From your parents to your professors to your old preschool playmates, more than 55 million people have claimed their page of Facebook, and according to the Internet marketing research company comScore, each user is getting in an average of 20 minutes of Face-time per day.

On its journey from a procrastination tool exclusively for U.S. college students to a global socializing phenomenon, Facebook has raised some tough questions of privacy and ethics, and users’ Facebook faux pas—disreputable photos, offensive wall posts—have drawn national attention. Yet something that remains largely under the radar in this nirvana of networking is the mental effects of spending time in a vacuum of uninhibited communication and self-disclosure that’s full of boundless information about the people around you.

“It can mess with your identity, especially at a stage in life when you’re just starting to form an identity, like during college,” says James Houran, a Dallas-based clinical psychologist who specializes in online relationships.

Here, a glimpse beyond Facebook’s face value at the mental appeal and effects of what great minds have dubbed “Internet crack.”

WHY YOU’RE HOOKED

Be it baseball cards or beer bottles, humans love collecting, and Facebook lets you collect what poets praise as priceless: friends. Mark McKinley, professor of psychology at Lorain County Community College in Ohio, says a collection of any kind represents a quest, and the collector is often in pursuit of security, a way to fill an emotional void, or even a way to achieve distinction, fame or notoriety. Collecting Facebook friends, like any other collection, is characterized by comparing your stock to others’, and more always means better.

Tim Phillippe, Forth Worth, Texas freshman, says amassing Facebook friends is probably a way some students boost their self-esteem. “I’ve met people who instantly want to be Facebook friends when I’ve spoken one or two words to them,” Phillippe says. “When I see these people have 800 friends, I think they may not have a lot of close friends, so they’re trying to feel secure by having hundreds of Facebook friends.”

Facebook also plays on our desire to disclose information about ourselves and also dig into what others are disclosing. “In today’s culture, we like to see ourselves and see others—a combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism. Facebook is the perfect example of how these two come together,” says Bill Staples, department chair and professor of sociology at KU. Staples, who researches the connections between technology and voyeurism, says the desire to broadcast information about ourselves is a significant departure from the attitudes of our parents, who are more guarded concerning their personal lives.

A nationwide study published in February reported that today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than previous generations, and researchers partly attributed these new attitudes to sites like Facebook, where each of us can become the center of a simulated universe. Staples says, however, that adding a page to the Book points more toward a social expectation for college students than self-absorption. “We want to put ourselves out there because we want to participate. If you’re not there, it’s like you don’t exist,” he says. “In a sense, you’re seduced into being on it whether you want to or not, and it may turn out to be kind of oppressive.”

Sarah Kirk, director of KU Psychological Services, says Facebook is appealing because it allows us to keep a tabloid-like eye on the people we know, while also living like our private lives are fascinating enough to merit page six coverage. “It matches our culture,” Kirk says. “We all know everything that Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are doing, so then when our own privacy is taken away, we don’t always think about that as negative.”

YOU THINK YOU KNOW…

Way back when (oh, four years ago), close interaction and time were usually necessary to find out someone’s favorite books, his or her relationship status or political views. But with Facebook, you can now dig into all this and more without ever having to speak face-to-face.

John Grohol, a Boston-based psychologist and publisher of the online mental health network Psych Central, says this ability to instantly access someone’s personal information without any effort to get to know him or her desensitizes our awareness of and response to valuable details about people. Instead, every behavior becomes a generic, bland fact with no relevance to your relationship with the person. “We feel like it’s bringing us closer to the person, but this is an artificial connection,” Grohol says. “Finding out that you’re going to the airport or you’re up all night studying—those are factual pieces of info about your life, but they’re without context. You have all this information, but you’re not able to validate it like you would if you were actually communicating with the person face-to-face.”

And although Facebook seems an authentic paradise of knowledge, the site actually creates more questions than it gives answers. “You never get the whole story when you learn about something or someone through Facebook,” says clinical psychologist James Houran. “You may feel you know a person online and you only know a part of them—not all of them—and that can be awkward then in person, because you don’t know what part of them you know.”

For self-proclaimed Facebook addict Caitlin Nowlin, Riverton junior, the site has led to some uncomfortable moments on campus. “I definitely have Facebook friends that I’m not friends with on campus,” Nowlin says. “It’s just like seeing someone you don’t even know, but it’s a little awkward because you feel like you should know them.”

Not only are some things better left off Facebook for the sake of your own pride and privacy, but the well-being of an entire community can take a hit from too much information. “The more info you have about people, the more it can promote negative behaviors like rumor-spreading that kill groups and communities,” Houran says.

Being overloaded with info on how others are living their lives isn’t good for your own mental well-being, either. “Knowing too much about people is never a good thing,” Houran says. “It tends to increase peer pressure, and you tend to be a follower, not a leader.” He also says that finding out on Facebook that you were left out of something can be a bigger blow to your ego than finding out the same thing offline. “It amplifies the feeling of rejection. Offline, you’re only going to know a few general things about an event that’s happening, but on Facebook you can track all the details of an event and everyone that was there. Suddenly it can feel like you were rejected by all 200 people there.”

GETTIN’ FRIENDLY

The Internet has introduced oodles of words into our lexicon, but give Facebook credit for morphing the word “friend” into a verb. Along with becoming a new part of speech, the term has also, thanks to Facebook, seen a shift in its meaning.

“‘Friend’ can now mean anything from a real, true friend in the traditional sense of the word to a complete stranger you’ve never met,” Grohol says. “It’s really a disappointing misuse of the English language.”

While Grohol says social networking sites have cleverly used “friend” to draw people in, he says the shift in connotation can actually lead to a distorted sense of friendship, causing us to develop false feelings of attachment and develop attachments quicker. Grohol says these simulated friendships we have online can cause us to spend less time with those friends who are really available to us.

Greg Hall, professor of psychology at Bentley College in Massachusetts, says being friends with someone online can never truly capture the nuance and the subtleties of a face-to-face relationship. “When your means of getting to know someone is through online interaction, you don’t have the same cues to draw upon—nothing like facial expression, eye contact or tone of voice to gauge the person’s interest level, and these are what help people build genuine rapport and attachment,” Hall says.

Most experts acknowledge that analyzing the psychology of Facebook is difficult because the site hasn’t yet been the subject of much scientific research, though some curious minds have indeed started to investigate. Larry Rosen, professor of psychology as California State University Dominguez Hills and author of Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation, studied how many of the friends people consider “online” friends they also consider to be their “real-life” friends. Rosen says the two numbers do overlap, though usually never 100 percent.

Rosen also conducted a study in 2006 in which participants were introduced to a “friend” on a social networking site and given the opportunity to get to know him or her and share information about themselves. “There is a gut-level sense that you always have anonymity when communicating with someone online, even if you know the person,” Rosen said. “We found that if people were told they’d have to interact with the person face-to-face later on, they were less self-revealing online.”

MIND YOUR MANNERS

Meredith Tack, Oklahoma City senior, logged onto Facebook one morning to learn for the first time that she and her boyfriend were no longer “in a relationship.” Any feelings of heartbreak quickly took a backseat to Tack’s astonishment at this blunt break-up approach. “I was like, ‘are you kidding me?’” Tack says. “I thought it was a really rude, distant way of doing things, and I don’t have much respect for people who can’t talk to you face-to-face.”

In defense of Tack’s bad-mannered ex-boyfriend, Houran says too much time on Facebook can actually stunt your communication skills and emotional intelligence, so that you may very well think that breaking up via Facebook is the best way to handle the situation. After all, if a relationship isn’t official until it’s “Facebook official,” perhaps it’s only really over when it’s over on Facebook.

Houran says Facebook interaction doesn’t allow us to learn or perfect real-world social skills, and as a result, we may find ourselves more awkward and less articulate in unfamiliar social settings. “The flow of conversation online is not the same as it is offline,” Houran says. “That time in between me responding allows me to think. We don’t have that opportunity when we’re in a job interview, in school. “

Hall says that we follow established social norms in face-to-face communication, and we have a different set of norms for interacting with a professor than for interacting with our classmates, for example. These standards for behavior don’t exist in online social settings, however, and we thus often lose the inhibitions that keep us from embarrassing ourselves in face-to-face conversation. “A lot of misunderstandings and embarrassments happen because of social networking sites,” Hall says. “In face-to-face communication, comments might be more subtle. Online communication lacks expression and intonation, which convey a lot of how you mean to say something.”

A MIXED BAG

The cultural cloud that is Facebook does have a silver lining.

For Kerri Kolzow, Chicago senior, the site is useful for staying in the loop with her friends back home. “I’m not a junkie, but I like being able to see what my friends in other towns are doing,” Kolzow says. “I don’t know if we could keep in touch as easily without Facebook.”

Houran says that before sites like Facebook, we didn’t have as much contact with people from other areas of the world, and when groups of people who couldn’t meet before can meet and interact, we become more open-minded. “Often times we are more comfortable with people familiar to us,” Houran says. “But with Facebook, we don’t rush to first impressions or judgments so quickly.”

Kim Gregson, assistant professor of communications at Ithaca College, says Facebook can help shy students better integrate into college environments and also give them an outlet to express themselves and eventually become more open to face-to-face interaction.

Gregson adds that, for the most part, people will be just as honest about themselves online as they are in person, and that even in face-to-face communication, most people present a persona that is different from their core identity. “People you meet face-to-face in a bar are not going to be 100 percent honest with you,” Gregson says. “I think there’s a lot more honesty and positive aspects of Facebook than people give it credit for.”

For now, it’s an open Book.