After researching Qatar in general and the social networking in Qatar I found out many new things that I had no knowledge of at all before. When I first found out that this was the country I was required to do my research on, my initial reaction was that I had no idea where it was located or even what it was for that matter. Therefore, all of the things I found out about it were new and interesting to me.
One of the main things that I kept coming across when doing my research was that Qatar had the highest facebook support of any bid to try to get the FIFA World Cup to be held there in 2022. So far there are almost six hundred thousand supporters of this facebook page. There is also a twitter page created for this same event. The twitter has almost four thousand followers thus far. The fact that this countries bid is currently the highest shows that quite a lot of people using popular social networking sites have been viewing this and keeping up with it. Not only have people who live in the country of Qatar been “liking” it on facebook, but eleven other countries have been supporting it as well. The common age group of the supporters is from individuals between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four, with most of them being females. This I find to be a very interesting statistic because it shows that the majority of the people using facebook seem to be very young. Compared to USA I think that the facebook users here have a much broader age group. Another shocking statistic that I found was that there are roughly one hundred and twenty five million facebook users in the United States and only fifteen million in Middle East and North Africa. This truly shows that facebook is much more of a common thing in America. It shows that our lives revolve so much around it that for some people it consumes their life. But in other countries such as Qatar it is not nearly as much of a priority and it is something that they do not need to fulfill their daily lives. That is nothing less than what I expected though. I have always thought that other countries did not rely on the internet and social networking in particular for things that we do here. I actually think that it is a good thing that Qatar does not have nearly as many users because there are so many more important things in life that one should focus on. I am not saying that facebook is a bad thing, but I think that it is good that not very many people in this country have a facebook account.
I also found a news article about a girl from Qatar who has a secret identity online. In real life she is a seventeen-year-old Syrian girl but online she has multiple identities. Online she does not share her name, age, or where she is from. No one online viewing her social networking sites knows who she really is. She sees her online identity as being someone she is not in real life; she thinks she is more interesting to people online. To her it is like an entirely new world when she is online. This I find to be a bad thing, I feel like if this one girl is doing it imagine how many other people around the world that are as well. It brings the question to mind, do we really know whom we are talking to when we are conversing with others online? We can only hope that we do. While viewing the article about this girl I found a few more interesting statistics. There are nearly fifty six million internet users in the Arab world; this number is expected to double with in the next three years. That shows that the internet is expanded so much and will soon consume many people’s lives.
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