Sometime in the last decade, the notion of discretion has become old-fashioned. This change is due to the rise of those social tools that serve simply to keep us connected with everybody at all times: specifically Facebook. With its introduction suddenly nobody is private, nobody is discrete, everybody is simply a Facebook attention whore.

It has become an enigma for college students. How our Facebook looks and reads is crucial for those important first-impressions that could "make or break" an entire friendship. They are at the same time public diaries and personal ads. Not actual diaries, mind you, filled with the humiliatingly honest stuff we hide deep inside away from the eyes of the world. No, these diaries are a carefully cleaned, edited, and pruned versions advertising our smiling faces as your potential next friend. Facebook is just a database of prostitutes and by clicking that "add as friend" or "accept friend request" you are merely satiating their base needs. Although few will openly admit it, we spend more time on our pithy statuses than we would suggest.

In our modern world stressing independence and movement, it is so hard to hang on to those ever fading strands of distance-strained friendship. Facebook clearly proves an answer. It is meant to stay in touch with that one special person you held hands with in second grade only to be torn apart by the twisted worlds of adults. If you long to see them you can merely take a cursory glance in all the pictures she's been tagged in and secretly read everything written on her wall, and to make contact just a couple hours of scrutinizing over the perfectly eloquent and concise ten-word wall-post.

Facebook serves to bridge the lonely hours by creating an online community to replace the more organic, actual communities we seem to be abandoning with each step into the digital realm. If you're on Facebook, you are never alone. (You have 500 "friends"). But instead of fostering actual connection, they inevitably activate our ignoble and more unscrupulous human instincts: narcissism, vanity, schadenfreude. Each post we make, each note we write is accompanied by the instant gratification that within one click, an entire network of friends will see my creative mind in action. We use our Facebooks not for any social reason but for the simple desire to be discovered, to be seen, and heard. Now, more than ever, society is encouraging that everybody has some reason to shine - take American Idol or Britain's Got Talent as an example. And Facebook is simply the commonman's solution to the problem. There's no wait upon submitting. There's no editorial review. A picture. A click. And we advertise ourselves to the world. We are prostituting ourselves out on Facebook because we are all attention-whores. Deep down. We are all narcissistic and we are all vain.

I want to be heard now! I want to be discovered! I want to be praised! Now! Now! Now!