Finally! The day I had been waiting anxiously for all summer came at last: roommate assignments. After skimming the names in the email that Residential Life had sent, I didn’t hesitate to rush Facebook to try to gather all the information I could on the two girls I would be sharing a room with for a year.

This moment seems pivotal in a rising freshman’s life: Being caught up in the mystery and wonder of what your future roommates will actually be like, but frustrated by the impossibility of gauging their true personality through a computer screen. At least, that’s how it should be: Recognizing that it is impossible to actually know someone just by checking out his or her online profiles.

I, like many of my peers, spend countless hours on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites. I check out other peoples’ profiles, and sometimes land on my friend’s brother’s girlfriend’s mom’s sister’s page, and then realize I have taken it a step too far. Sometimes I attribute my social media obsession to curiosity of other peoples’ lives, and the desire to learn things about people, but then I remember: How much am I going to learn from an Instagram bio? How much can I learn about someone from the number of likes they average on profile pictures? The answer should be clear: Not much.

But I keep crawling back.

Why am I obsessed with this online scene? The simple answer is that I don’t know. Sure, participating in social media is something to do, and it’s nice to get a lot of likes on your pictures. But it’s the worst when you are with a group of friends, and all of you are hunched over, typing furiously on your phones. The devices that are supposed to be connecting us seem to be driving us apart.

So, when I looked up my roommates I found two girls. I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me, regardless of how much Facebook stalking we did. We had to wait until August to meet and then realize what really amazing friends we would be. No Facebook profile photo or Instagram picture could have told us that.

So maybe, if we sometimes look up from our phones, we will realize that nothing that important is happening on our phones. Maybe we will even see a rainbow or something. Who knows, but we certainly will not know if we are looking down at a bright screen.