Social media has transformed the world in a matter of years, to the point where a handful of these communication channels are the first port of call for millions of people every day. Many of us would find it impossible to live without our daily or hourly fix – a fact reflected in usage figures. Facebook, launched a decade ago, now has 1.23 billion active users. Twitter, eight years old, has around 250 million active users. Instagram, not yet four years old, topped 200 million active users earlier this year.
A new study has revealed that female Emiratis are among the most connected people in the world with the majority having and using more than one social media account. As The National reported yesterday, research by Hanan Abdullah at the University of Wollongong in Dubai found that 97 per cent of teenage girls and 87 per cent of young women had at least three accounts on social media. The survey also showed that Instagram is the most popular platform for networking, while Twitter was the preferred platform to source news.
Some have suggested these high percentages are driven by peer pressure, especially for teenage girls, and that they indicate a desire to conform rather than a deeply entrenched online culture, but that would rather contradict what we all see before us: social media feeds all around the country that are awash with debate and commentary at all hours of the day.
Social media is opening doors and discussions that had previously remained shut, but does it also threaten traditions, society or worse?
At the fringes and in extreme cases there is cause for concern. We have seen how such sites have been effectively harnessed and used by radical groups to preach hatred, misinformation and intolerance and by individuals to blackmail or compromise others. More mundanely, but probably more dangerously for teenagers, they can also be used to bully or even, in some cultures, to encourage suicide.
But for the vast majority of users, those who inhabit the mainstream, social media is simply an effective communication tool, something that the statistics bear out. Such networks are also effecting changes to society that are both subtle and profound: changing the way we are all forced to think about privacy and the way we communicate, while also settling into the culture of individual countries. It is a delicate balancing act and one that will need to be checked regularly.
