Ro'aia never speaks about herself and isn't the kind of person who readily engages in ‘factual' discourse with ‘real' people. However, she has found herself a window from which she can open her heart to the world. She is blogging all about her life online. In the late nineties, blogging first arrived in Egyptian society. It has grown quickly to become one of the most prominent applications of social networking media. "Written words express my feelings better, especially when I'm anonymous," 26-year-old Ro'aia Abdel-Hakim told the Mail quite frankly. "I'm used to listening to others, but few people seem to listen, as everyone wants to talk." Being a customer service agent, Ro'aia learnt how to listen carefully and interact with people, but couldn't find a space ��" among her acquaintances ��" to talk straightforwardly. Thus, she created this space herself two years ago through her blog. For various reasons, blogging and social media tools have been spreading rapidly to the extent that statistics about their users genuinely change from one day to another. A recent report from the Information and Decision-making Support Centre (IDSC) shows that there were 160,000 Egyptian blogs in April 2008 ��" 30.7 per cent of the blogs in the Arab World and 0.2 per cent of the world's blogs. Social media tools ��" social networking websites like Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, blogs and forums ��" reflect closely the social, political and cultural status of their users. They also connect people in the virtual and the physical worlds. "If I'm against anything the Government does, I don't talk about it but I create a group on Facebook to complain about it. Other people who agree with me can also join the group," says Alaa Metwali, who has a net of around 1,500 friends on the social networking Facebook website. Metwali has created nearly 20 groups on this website, with thousands of members and followers. "It's very important to know how to gather and connect people. In the past that was kind of hard, but now I can reach a thousand people with the click of a mouse," he adds. After Google, Facebook is the Egyptians' second most popular website. With around 2.4 million users, Egypt is the first country in the Arab world and the 23rd worldwide in terms of number of Facebook users. Egyptians represent 1 per cent of the world's total users of Facebook, according to the IDSC report. Because of this huge number of users, Facebook has been the instigator of several movements in the physical world, like the April 6 strike, which first started on Facebook in 2008 and soon spread from the virtual world to the real one. "If you look at the users of social media all over the world, they tend to be young people who are angry and frustrated," Ramsey Tesdell, a co-founder of a ‘citizen journalism' website, 7iber.com, told the Egyptian Mail in an interview. "This sort of medium gives them the tool they need to express themselves freely, as well as bridging the virtual and physical worlds." For Ramsey, a 27-year-old Palestinian-American journalist living in Jordan, social media alone can't make any change. In his view, there must be many other elements for social media to have a tangible influence on any society. "It can't make a change by itself, as there must be a clear vision for this change and active people to lead it; otherwise it'll just be a tool for letting off steam," he explains. Blogs with political content in Egypt represent 18.9 per cent of the total, while personal affairs' blogs represent 15.5 per cent, 14.4 per cent are cultural blogs and 7 per cent religion-related blogs. The most popular are the ‘diversified' ones, accounting for 30.7 per cent of Egyptian blogs. Another very influential social networking website is the first video-sharing website Youtube, the fourth most popular website with Egyptians. Users in this most populous Arab country represent 0.9 per cent of the website's users worldwide. Youtube is the destination for video-sharing lovers all over the globe, with 23.9 per cent of Internet users worldwide visiting the website. Although it only started five years ago, in February 2005, it would take someone over 412 years to watch all its content until 2008, according to alexa.com. In Egypt, 23rd globally and second in the Arab world ��" after Saudi Arabia ��" in terms of users of Youtube, social media have been playing a special role politically and socially. As well as gathering people together, they have managed to take them from the virtual world to the physical one. "I'm always meeting new people on Internet forums and Facebook, but that's my big secret," says Dina Mohamed, 17, with a grin. "My parents are very skeptical and they see threats everywhere. If they knew I talked to strangers, they'd ground me forever." Most of the older generation of Internet users are much more conservative and cynical than the younger users. Statistics show that the majority of social media users go for entertainment and/or social connectedness. Still, in some cases, a blog or Facebook profile could aim higher than that. "I'm going to have my Facebook notes published as a book soon," says Ahmed Zakaria, 23. "I've been writing about everything that concerns me, politically, socially, religiously and economically, for two years now." Zakaria describes the moment when he "suddenly couldn't find any of those notes in his profile" as the "darkest moment" of his life. For someone like this young writer, Facebook is his window to readers and to his deeper self. Because of their political or anti-governmental writings or instigating the crowds, a lot of bloggers, Facebook members and so-called ‘electronic/online activists' have been arrested in Egypt, the Arab world and indeed globally. Bloggers and social media activists see the conflict between authorities and the new tools as ‘one-sided', with the latter winning in the end. "Governments can censor these tools, but the more they try, the more they realise how hard it is to mentor this fast-growing technology," Naseem Tarawnah, a Jordanian blogger who recently won a Brass Crescent award for the best Middle East blog, told this paper in an interview. "Social media grow faster than governmental censorship," adds Tarawnah, whose blog tackles political, social and many controversial themes. But the most impressive thing about this blog ��" and many other diversified blogs ��" is that it reflects both the character of its creator and the world he lives in. With photos, videos, written texts and caricatures, social media stand as the strongest communication tools so far, simply because they use other tools and technology. In some Egyptian blogs you can sense the beauty of the country, along with people's problems, the bright face alongside the ugly one. In many cases, they present something new and that's why some of them become very influential. "How to use these tools is what matters," Tarawnah concludes. "It's tough to silence people when they have tools."
