This is a follow on to yesterday’s article about “Face The Facts? Debunking the Myths some Singapore journalists have of Facebook“

Yesterday I wrote about how some of TODAY’s views on identity theft can be a bit alarmist as I felt that their journalist did not truly understand the privacy features available. Truly your privacy is yours to keep if you protect yourself well.

For example, you wouldn’t walk around naked or leave the windows open when changing if you really don’t want your privacy to be compromised.

As a matter of fact, the analogy that women shouldn’t be wearing revealing clothes if they didn’t want to be stared at in public can be applied online too. Yes girls out there with all those sexy, seductive, teasing photos, watch out, there are lots of dangerous lurkers out there!

So today’s follow on is about TODAY’s contributor Ms Holly Jean Aroozoo commenting about how Facebook is full of Self-Loving Exhibitionists. In her article she talks about how Facebook is so annoyingly addictive. (Erm actually her “article” is about 3 paragraphs long).

(Again, If you’d like to read, it’s on TODAY, Aug 25, pg 42. Download a scan here 8.5mb)

Funny how this is full of ironies because Holly is also an exhibitionist online with numerous pictures from her modelling and pageant days. (Go find it yourself on Facebook) And that she’s addicted to Facebook otherwise she wouldn’t be writing so passionately about her own addiction and wouldn’t been able to so comprehensively identify all the different characters.

I’d take it that in no way is she disliking the technology but actually loves it very much. The poor girl is actually a celebrity in real life. I think many of us would remember her in the New Paper New Face or Miss Singapore Universe sometime ago. I wonder when did she get roped in to write about technology? (But that digresses and is midly snarky.)

So if she’s annoyed by Serial-Pokers, I must say that is the price to pay for her own fame. Poking means everything and nothing. (I took this from Stutzman.) It is a hello! yet not a hello! Carries a sexual connotation to some yet is totally cute to others. Poking was the original Facebook feature that you could use to ‘spread some love’, to say hi to a friend without having to type a message or say hi to a stranger without having to thinking of something to actually say.

Poking, jabbing, hugging. They’re not meaningless. In social networks, there is a need to mirror real world interactions through virtualized actions like this because they help people make a technology that is essentially emotionless warm.

Leaving messages back and forth on wall posts is actually a very interesting social phenomenon. Do you realize that people have been holding conversations that would, in the past, have been done through private email threads? That is significant because of a whole new level of transparency embedded in such an action.

Whereas email is private, why do people leave back and forth messages on Walls out there knowing that it will be read by everyone who comes by? Is it a validation of their popularity? For some people I’ve talked to, it seems IM has been blocked at their school or workplace so back and forth wall posting becomes the new IM.

The thing is, a lot of young people are shifting away from identity-less email and carrying out their communications over social networks. I’m not too sure why nor am I able to provide empirical evidence why but I think it has something to do with the contextuality afforded by conducting communications in the vincinity of identity profiles. Maybe social-proof plays a big part too?

I must say that I am personally guilty of being both a Group Junkie and Face Collector. For the charge of being a Group Junkie, it’s not so much about proving sense of humor but rather about forming identity. I only join the groups I identify with such as the fun, funny or those aligned towards my causes or my friends causes. Simple.

As for Face Collecting, I’m sure some people are guilty of it. But actually the other way to look at it is that Facebook is a truly fantastic tool for keeping in touch with people or knowing what’s going on in your friend’s life. Just like how blogs have helped us answer the age-old question of “how’s it going?”, Facebook is helping us to massively gather and filter this simple question.

NewsFeed is a phenomenal tool with complicated algorithms behind it. It is the newspaper of your social life. And because it’s so good, even in its current incarnation, it does a fantastic job in surfacing interesting news about your friends that can be a great base-point to initiate conversations.

Seeing an interesting photo from that friend of yours that you’ve not met for a long time, you leave a comment and spark off a new thread of interaction. How precious is that? Can you say when was the last time you did that in the real world without having to endure lots of travel?

Lastly, the PhotoFiend is not a new phenomenom. Please, bloggers, especially Asian, Female bloggers have been known to write less and put up more pictures especially when they know that the number of traffic to their blogs is proportional to the number of cleavage showing pictures. Instant kick! With FaceBook offering unlimited photo hosting, some people are uploading their entire life-albums!

See my point is that annoyance is a matter of preference. If you’re annoyed. Turn off your notifications, tune down your newsfeeds meter and block off the idiots. Even better, delete your Facebook account, that way there’s no longer any reason to complain. Yes, if you don’t already know there are such features available in Facebook.

To end it off, I’d like to say it’s like the pretty gal out there who knows she’s hot and pretty claiming that it is a problem with society for looking at her. There would be no end to arguments like this because humans inherently crave attention. Some people don’t even get enough attention!

And oh yes, if you really want to see a website full of self-loving exhibitionists, go check out MySpace and Friendster.