To understand the soul of a generation, it’s never a bad idea to look at how it spends its time.

Prior generations found their defining activities in wars in Europe and Vietnam, in campus protests or in higher education and business.

Our defining activity may well be using the Internet. When social scientists look back at us from the distance of futurity, the first thing they see may be Facebook.

While it’s easy to dismiss Facebook as just another entertainment system — a DVD player or video game console for Internet networking — no entertainment system carries as much weight in organizing society as Facebook currently does among the “millennial” set.

More importantly, Facebook explains a lot about us, such as how we think, how we relate to others and how we view ourselves. That Facebook (and not, say, Amazon.com) is where this generation meets and organizes itself has fascinating implications for politics, economics and society.

To understand this generation’s politics and culture, a future researcher will have to examine why, exactly, Facebook has caught the attention of a generation.

First, Facebook’s dueling purposes help explain the duality at the center of this generation’s experience.

Look at your profile, for instance. At the top of your page, Facebook asks, “What’s on your mind?” You tell it. You are prompted to enter your personal information. This isn’t just contact information or your resume. This is the more intangible, the more personal. You enter your favorite shows, books and movies. You share quotes. Some are from your life and some are from the authors and thinkers who speak to you. You join groups, you pose for photos, you support causes, all to define your digital self.

Not surprisingly, in the midst of all this sharing, millennials have developed a very strong sense of self. Sometimes this is made manifest in excessive self-esteem, the inevitable consequence of the “Trophy Kid” growing up. But more often it leads to self-knowledge — of the good and bad alike.

Millennials know who they are. This generation is far less characterized by the soul-searching and ennui that baby boomers lived with and the cynicism that was their children’s reaction.

Along with the obvious self-knowledge and self-definition that Facebook allows, it also reflects a strong desire for community that would seem incongruous in a purely self-interested generation.

None of the features of Facebook would be very useful if you were the only one there. Applications, groups, causes and photos — all of these features depend on the participation of your social circle. Researchers have termed the connection this fosters “ambient awareness.” The expansion of this awareness is a phenomenon perhaps unparalleled in human interaction. Ambient awareness usually depends on close physical proximity — access to the physical clues that help one person know another.

But thanks to Facebook, we are now aware of the digital quirks, tics, moods, senses of humor, habits of mind and favored activities of hundreds more people than we could have kept up with before the Internet.

And we like it.

This would all seem too much, and we would flee from social networking sites if we didn’t. But the desire for community that Facebook satisfies — if only digitally — is real.

So this is us: a generation of self-knowing, driven, even empowered young people who thirst for a connection, some connection to something larger, something real to identify with.

We know ourselves, and we know we need other people if we’re going to do something great.

Whatever this generation does, I think it’s going to be interesting.

Let Will know what you think about our generation at wmunsil@asu.edu