That monolith of a social networking site is due to acquire its 200 millionth user in the next few days, if it hasn’t already. You know which one I mean: Facebook. Although I have resented the site ever since my friends in high school urged me to join it, Facebook is apparently here to stay. It has become more than just a website. Since its creation in 2004, its name has changed from the more humble “thefacebook.com” to a proper noun to be reckoned with. It is an entity nearing nationhood status, a verb and a place.

Just as Facebook’s own identity has become more strident, the stakes for self-identification have risen for its users as well. Recent commentary about Facebook, and other interfaces such as Twitter, has focused on how this latest wave of technology influences the way people interact with one another. I’m interested in how it influences the way we see ourselves. Rather than a technological representation of yourself, the persona you adopt on Facebook is in many ways its own separate entity. Does Facebook mandate a more honest representation of who we are, in both public and private spheres, or does it reproduce the same kind of behavior we have everywhere else, just in a different medium?

The inspiration for this column came from the horrible realization that my relationship to my own profile is similar to my relationship to other profiles, suggesting a distance between me and my Facebook self. The behavior goes something like this: One way or another I find myself on Facebook, whether to check the time on an event invite, look up a friend’s email address or see if there are any new pictures of a friend I miss. Before I know it, I am looking at the pictures or profile of someone I barely know. Getting sucked into Facebook happens so easily and quickly, it may be impossible to understand unless you have experienced it for yourself. I form an impression of this random person, and then remember that other people may be doing the exact thing with my profile and pictures: looking at them and forming an idea of who I am, and what my life is like.

Imagining their perspective, I begin to wonder who I am and what my life is like. I go take a look. I click on my own name with almost the same interest and curiosity I felt when I clicked on a relative stranger’s name. I survey the pictures and profile information with amusement, pondering how I look to other people and measuring the truthfulness of what the conclusions they would draw. Even though I have full control over the accuracy of the information displayed on my page, the possibly of me actually being known through my page seems remote. It is an eerie exercise in detachment.

The profile is essentially a form you fill out that is supposed to represent you, with prompts for things like: birthday, hometown, and education; sexuality; political and religious views; interests, extra-curricular activities, favorite books, movies and quotes. This gives you a loosely guided space in which to define who you are. You can fill out the whole thing, leave it blank or ignore the suggestions and write anything you feel like writing (as long as it doesn’t violate the Terms of Use, of course). This last option is the most creative, and for that reason, the most attractive to me. Just because you are on Facebook doesn’t mean you have to play by its rules.

But in my experience few people opt for that approach. Most of my friends either take the disinterested route by writing very little, or jump into it head first and fill their page with personal facts in an attempt to represent who they are. To do that accurately means to change your profile often, because identity changes. And no matter how hard you try, the collection of preferences and quotes on your profile will never give the same impression as meeting you in person. Although I am slightly in awe of the people who put a lot of effort into crafting their Facebook profile, I have to wonder if it is worth all the time it takes to create an identity mediated by Facebook. Isn’t it hard enough just to figure out the person you are in your day-to-day life?

Indeed, maybe Facebook and other virtual identities are a testament to the artificiality of “real” existence. What seems false about a Facebook personality can be countered with parallel examples from more traditional social interactions. Traditional networking — the practice of maintaining contacts for business purposes — is one example. A milestone in the adaptation to life with Facebook was the realization that employers might see prospective employees’ profiles. Tailoring your profile for employers is now par for the course for graduating college students. Changing your profile exposes the fact of socializing for utilitarian purposes, and how deeply it can run. If you have to change who you are on Facebook in order to be a successful business person, what else do you have to change?

Job-search constraints aside, perhaps Facebook provides a kind of escapism. An online personality is more fun, and more easily crafted — a rejection of your own role in everyday life for something that can be created on different terms. In this way, it is similar to Second Life, the online virtual world where users can invent personalities and live vicariously through them, interacting with other users’ invented people. Conversely, it could provide space for reflection on who you are and what is important to you, like a diary or a good conversation. The difference is that on Facebook, you have a large, passive audience. Identifying qualities that define you is different from broadcasting those qualities to hundreds of people who may or may not respond. That component of advertising a version of yourself is, I think, integral to the Facebook existence. And it is a version of yourself that need not align directly with any other version.

There are a lot of amazing things about Facebook. It connects people globally who may have never found each other otherwise. It provides a network for quick, widespread political mobilization. And it makes sharing messages, photos, videos, links and articles easier than ever. The idea has always been that Facebook is an extension of life outside of it, that it facilitates how we would behave anyway. But if it is a medium in which we see ourselves in isolation from our own living bodies and from those of others, what exactly does that say about the place that was its reference point?