Samar Yahya
Social media has become a fact in our life. At first social media originated as a personal tool that people used to interact with friends and family.
Currently it plays a major factor in our daily life and because it is ‘social media’, it has a great impact on our social life. Social media has totally changed the way people interact with one another. Internet has become a necessity in every home, office, hotel, and even café. Recent studies revealed that time spent on social media nearly tripled last year. With all its pros and cons, social media has greatly impacted people’s lives.
We cannot deny the positive role of social media that facilitates the communication among siblings who are living in different countries for study or business. Not only can family members talk to one another at no expense, but they can see each other’s faces and that twinkle in the eye you get when you speak to a loved one. School or college mates reunite over social media, who have not met for years. Every now and then, we read a story how social media helped two brothers or a mother and her son to meet after years of separation.
On the other hand, we notice nowadays that in most families, members who are living under the same roof are not communicating with one another in person. They spend their time on an electronic device chatting with people whom they have never met, but they have added them as ‘friends’ on some social media application.
It is common to enter a restaurant and see a group of four of five sitting to a table waiting for their food or for the waiter to take the order and each one of them is busy with his smart phone. You can see different reactions on their faces as each one is reading or chatting.
Talking about the same problem with my sister, she said that when she and her friends set a time to meet after a long period, they chat for a short while then each one of them holds her smart phone and begins to chat online.
My sister added that social media is destroying our language skills too, to the extent that sometimes our reply or comment on a post or message would be only an ‘emoji’.
After noticing that they are not chatting together while being at home, a fiend of mine set timing where her elderly sons can log on to social media channels.
Though in Islam we are asked to connect to blood relatives, social media has replaced these traditions. Previously, people used to visit or to talk on the phone to their relatives, friends and neighbors and wish them happiness during the two Eids or the new Hijri year. Now, it has become adequate if you congratulate your friends and relatives by a WhatsApp message or a post on Facebook sending your wishes to everyone at one time.
Visiting a sick person has been substituted by a WhatsApp message or a call to pray for him/her on Facebook. It is the right of a Muslim that if he falls ill, his friends and family members visit him. In the past, sending condolences through a phone call was only accepted from people living in another remote city or village, social media has become the common method to send your condolences. Inviting people to a wedding or a meal used to be a personal phone call or a printed invitation card; that maintains personal communication with relatives and friends. All that has been abridged into a message, a tweet, or a post!
I believe that social media is the main reason behind the younger generations “Arabizing”, or using certain letters and numbers in place of Arabic letters.
How many times have you met people on the elevator or escalator who keep staring at their smart phones and sometimes miss the floor that they wanted, or trip at the last step of the escalator?
A review on social media usage last year showed that Social Media users have risen by 176 million with over 2.206 billion active users. WhatsApp gained a 60% increase in users last year with 900 million users. Facebook users have now reached 1.55 billion, and there are 700 million using Facebook Messenger.
A recent report on ‘Social Media in the Arab World,’ unveiled that Facebook and WhatsApp are the most popular social networking sites in the region. A statistic on fourth quarter of 2015 on social networks in Saudi Arabia showed that 27% of population use WhatsApp, 25% Facebook and 20% Facebook Messenger and Twitter.
Social media is a change in our lives that we should learn to use efficiently, like being more aware of what is going around in the world, reaching out to loved ones, and being a tool in entrepreneurship and the spreading of amazing, productive ideas. However, we should not replace our real world with a virtual one.
