Last week I walked into my American Politics lecture late, which has upwards of 100 students. After maneuvering the awkward late-entry situation, I did what any sensible student would: sprint up the stairs to the back of the lecture hall as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. And after sitting down in the top row and getting settled, the view made me think “hmm, this is interesting.” From what I could see, every other person in the lecture hall had a tab open for Facebook.

Are we really that obsessed with Facebook that we cannot bear to go an hour at a time without it? Assuming that lecture professors are not so exaggeratedly boring to warrant this behavior (although I cannot be sure), my best guess is yes. Yes, we can’t bear to be apart from our precious Facebook accounts for the length of a class.

I experience a similar feeling with my cell phone. In most cases, it doesn’t enrich my life and won’t help me. Frankly, many of the interactions that occur through my phone could stand to wait an hour. But I can’t avoid that sneaking suspicion that the one time I forget it in my dorm a crisis of apocalyptic proportions will occur that only I can solve, and which must be solved in under an hour. My iPhone becomes synonymous with the PODUS’ Red Phone. I hope I’m not the only one.

Phones and computers are social networking tools. Perhaps there’s a deeper social psychology at play here: I once heard a theory that religion has been sustained in humanity because it is evolutionarily advantageous. The theory explained that regardless of the reason, the fact that people amassed together for a common goal bonded them toward other common goals, such as safety, shelter, and having enough food, which was key to survival. Humans have been selected for evolutionarily to be social creatures, to the extent that it often feels like as much of a “basic need” as the aforementioned common goals. Is Facebook a substitute for one of our basic needs for social interaction? And can we really not live without such a need for an hour?

That said, I am just as guilty of going on Facebook in class. For our seminar this usually means checking my privacy settings and our group page, but for other classes this could mean keeping up with a digital political debate or making sure no embarrassing pictures of me have been posted in the past 10 minutes. Or, it could be used as a distraction from those notoriously boring lecture professors…