A start-up company recently launched a Princeton branch for their new social media app directed to helping students meeting others with shared interests .

The release spurred sophomore Shruthi Deivasigamani to thinking about the hold social media has on student lives.

While at a brief glance it might seem like a small, rather trivial thing to be defined by, I think the obsession with social media says a lot about who we are. We communicate differently than our parents or our parents’ parents.

The generation that came before us pioneered modern uses of the Internet — from online business to online shopping — despite skepticism that it would never amount to anything more than a new form of communication, the next step after telegrams and telephones. The same way, I’ve tried to explain to my parents over dinner that the social media wave is more than just a cluster of websites that suck up too much of their kids’ time. It represents an even newer form of communication, different from email or even from text message.

Except, instead of changing communication in terms of medium or speed, the social media wave changes communication in terms of extent. It introduces a form of communication that’s passive. You don’t need to actively tell your best friend from middle school where you’re going to college because she saw your status update and already congratulated you. You’ve seen albums and albums of your niece’s baby photos despite the fact that she lives across the country and her mother keeps forgetting to call you back. Even though Facebook and similar sites have received a lot of criticism for being a platform for every old acquaintance’s mundane status update, and for a supposed lack of privacy, there’s a reason we keep coming back to it. Social media lets you feel like you’re always somewhat in the loop with all your friends without putting in too much effort. Its benefits far outweigh any offhand complaints we have.

The same way people were skeptical of what could and couldn’t be done on the Internet before, older people (or at least, my parents) are skeptical of what significant benefits social media can bring. The reason social media is such a passive medium of communication is that it’s already so seamlessly integrated into our lives, so it takes little additional effort to keep participating….

The social media revolution is neither a testament to our laziness nor our narcissism. It’s merely a reflection on how we interact and the level of technology we allow to integrate into our lives. And who knows, maybe the upcoming futuristic looking Google Glass will spark another revolution, and in another 15 years, everyone will be living a life far more entangled with technology than we can currently even fathom.