I fear some days that the spirit of Facebook haunts my fingers. I’ll sit down at the computer with a very specific task — downloading a PDF file from my ethics class or checking an email from a professor — and somehow, when I click that browser address bar and begin typing, there it appears — facebook.com — almost unconsciously.

 A study last year at University College London found that it takes about 66 days of repetition to form a habit. For most students, typing “facebook.com” is a daily, some say hourly, ritual. A 2007 Michigan State study counted the site at 50 million users, including 94 percent of U.S. college undergrads. Three years later, Mashable.com reports the site now boasts 500 million users, each spending an average of 55 minutes a day on the ‘book. Clearly, the muscle memory in my fingers is catching on.

 Recent hubbub has been made about the growing role of social media in student life. The Social Network, David Fincher’s pseudo-biopic on Facebook’s birth at Harvard, received high praise for telling how founder Mark Zuckerberg made “friend” a verb. At the same time, the suicide of a Rutgers freshman after online bullying made national headlines, prompting an Oct. 1 letter in The New York Times on “how enmeshed young adults are with technology.” The writer desired “young people to create healthy identities and be ‘whole’ without the obsessive need to be connected and share everything over the Internet.”

 So do we have “whole” and healthy identities? Have increasingly networked lives “enmeshed” us in the web? Yes and no, say experts who study the effect our growing digital lives has on our relationships, and in turn, our understanding of ourselves. Socially networked life, it turns out, mirrors our face-to-face lives, only frozen and broadcast to all. Actions always present in everyday life — the sharing and comparing, the self-promoting and conforming — are accelerated, each one leaving a digital trail.

 We form our identities by interacting with other people, says Nancy Baym, author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age. “From the day we’re born, people give us messages about who we are,” she says. What’s more, humans seem to have a built-in need to confirm experiences through telling them to others. Behind every story that begins with “You will not believe what happened last night” lies a desire for that story to be acknowledged and confirmed. When another person recognizes an experience, it somehow exists outside of our own memories and feels permanent. And this process of identity-through-confirmation exists with or without the Internet.

 Relationships play out online much like they do in real life, Baym says, except for two key factors: storage and reach.

Storage

 “Storage” refers to the Internet’s ability to log and record our actions, such as “wall-to-wall” conversations on Facebook or a series of Tweets on Twitter. Once published, they stay there to be reread and examined in a way fleeting face-to-face conversations do not, something Megan Do, Wichita senior, realizes. “The funny moments, the interesting observations — they’re all there,” she says. “Sometimes for the hell of it I’ll read older posts. I’m not talking three days or so. I mean I just keep clicking back and going ‘Wow, I can’t believe that happened.’” Storage allows our online conversations to exist unbound by time constraints of “real life.” Do can respond to a friend’s comment weeks later, an impossible feat in face-to-face conversation.

Reach

 “Reach” refers to the broadcasting power of online actions — the way a message can go from a bedroom to across campus in the click of a button. In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to an ex-girlfriend he drunkenly bashes online, a tirade read all over campus. “It didn’t stop you from writing it,” she responds. “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.”

 Since Facebook’s debut in 2004, growing awareness of how storage and reach affect our online interactions has, in turn, affected those actions themselves. We’re careful about what we post, tweet or tag down to the details, lest we’re misunderstood. Consequently, we’re more aware of how we portray ourselves online, says Ian McFarland, Leawood senior. “People put a lot more thought into their profiles than anyone admits to,” he says. “I know I put a lot of thought into it.”

 McFarland’s not alone. A cursory glance at any Facebook news feed shows a whirlwind of profile changes: new “friends” are made, display pictures change and people forge new statuses in mere keystrokes. This meticulous flurry makes sense — every detail a user places online acts as an indicator, or cue, that peers can use to understand him. Likewise, he uses his peers’ cues to situate and understand himself within this social environment.

 This process occurs online or off. Baym, author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age, compares it to how children develop their sense of self when peers tease or praise them at school. Yet never in elementary school could I slow friends down in the hallway and endlessly examine them in different outfits, with different sayings in different situations. Never could I know their likes and dislikes, their passions and joys, without actually interacting with them. “That it’s stored, accessible and has such reach allows social media to amplify the process,” Baym says. “It’s so visible. We have this whole data source about who people are to compare ourselves to.”

Making sense of being cool

 And compare we do, says Havanah Mahoney, a Manhattan junior in photo media. “It’s easier to see what the people you think are cool think is cool, so you can think it’s cool,” she says. “If that makes sense.”

 Whether Mahoney’s point makes sense, it is supported by science. In 2007, MIT researcher Hugo Liu analyzed more than 125,000 online profiles for his study, “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performance.” He discovered users often listed bands of a similar taste or genre as that of their closest friends on a site. This, Liu wrote, “demonstrates knowledge of the group’s ‘inside secrets.’” However, users would also list something outside of their friends’ shared taste: “Wilco, Feist, Radiohead…and also old-school hip-hop,” read one profile. Liu theorized that users sought to stand out and define themselves while keeping the inclusionary sense a shared culture brings. We want to fit in but still stand out — to have our social cake and eat it too.

 Liu’s study also asserted that users may meticulously craft not only their favorite bands online, but their entire identity as well. “Some profiles seemed intent on creating and inhabiting a caricature or theatrical persona,” he wrote, documenting two profiles maintaining a “manic depressive persona” and 14 profiles with a “sexy persona.” Liu even notes one profile projecting “a ‘frat boy’ machismo.” Ever aware that people whose opinions we care about — a crush from history class, a close friend or potential employer — may see our online selves (via reach) and endlessly analyze it (via storage), we can become self-branders, portraying an image or persona through every possible cue. As a photographer, Mahoney pays attention to profile pictures. “If someone meets you casually and looks you up on Facebook, that’s the only thing they’ll see of you,” she says. “You make sure you look attractive — no acne, no chin fat — so they’ll have a notion of you that will hold over.”

Creating self

 Why strive to create a notion or idea of ourselves? Perhaps we worry we’ll lose something in Internet translation — a razor-sharp wit or a firm, perfected handshake. In lieu of physical presence, there’s an obligation (or opportunity) to project a notion of yourself online, a distilled version conveying who you are, or at least the better parts. “I think most people put on some slight front,” Mahoney says. “You’re not going to list what you fail at. You put your achievements, your interesting hobbies — things that will fascinate people.” When distilled into a display picture and a paragraph, which facet of someone’s life makes it through? Mahoney isn’t really sure. “I’ve never made a profile where I really described who I am,” she says. “It’s surface layer, two-dimensional stuff. I’m not putting ‘Yes, I’m extroverted, but underneath I’m actually sensitive,’ — what I’m really about.”

 There’s pressure to put our best face forward online, says Oliver James, a clinical psychologist and columnist for The Guardian in England. “Facebook is full of high status moments,” he says. In a 2009 column, James expressed concern over social pressures that cause “young people to aim for maximum appeal, self-advertisement” online.

 Robin H-C, a Toronto-based behaviorist and neuropsychologist, agrees. She says social media’s reach allows users to craft an “illusion of grandiose times,” whereby statuses, photos and comments become opportunities to project idealized versions of our lives. Nothing quite conveys sociability like posting an entire publicly viewable album of party photos. Less-often posted, however, is the album full of people with hangovers.

 In 1959 Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman released his first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman proposes that people play roles in everyday life, crafting an appearance and carefully guiding others’ perceptions of them, much like actors. Goffman called this “impression management.”

 Fellow sociologist Barry Schlenker expanaded on this in the 1980s, writing that self-descriptions allow people to (consciously or not) “introduce pertinent information for identity construction.” Talking one’s self up, though, is rarely endearing. Without proper context, he noted, people risked seeming egotistical. What better context then, than Facebook — a service based around broadcasting images and self-descriptions to people in our lives? Through a series of studies, Schlenker also concluded that actors often conformed to stereotypes of admirable peer groups and that, given enough positive feedback, could come to believe the role they performed was true.

 At the Kansas Union, I met with Kiley Larson, a Ph.D. student in communication studies who works with Baym, author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age. At surrounding tables students scanned laptops, a few of which displayed the familiar blue and white site. Larson studied last summer at Oxford’s Internet Institute, where she and her peers weighed the costs of social media. For some, the constant upkeep of managing digital identities proved tiring. She says people often withdraw from sites like Facebook when they realize they must perform for multiple roles — you have only one profile, but different audiences like friends, family, and employers, who have different expectations. “I think Facebook runs a real risk of putting itself out of business,” she says. “A lot of people liked it because it was easy and fun. When it becomes work and a brand to be managed, perhaps it loses some of that fun.” Still, for Larson, the costs of leaving Facebook remain too high. A student in her Internet communication class, however, disagreed, logging out for good. To leave Facebook, the student reasoned, was to leave a life of continual self-monitoring.

 As the span and frequency of our online interactions grow, we’re realizing the effects of storage and reach. As a result, we’re adapting, projecting the ways we want to be perceived in life, but in a flatter, more mediated space. If users of social media aren’t whole, it’s not because of the Internet — it’s only amplified what was already there. Still, there’s no denying our digital lives and actions hold some effect on our tangible, physical ones. My Facebook-prone fingers are proof of that.