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 To a sizeable proportion of the Middle East and North Africa’s online population, other people are becoming faceless ciphers, mere collections of pixels that exist only from moment to fleeting moment, with no anchor in the reality away from their flat-screen monitors.
That, at least, is the result of a survey conducted by YouGov Siraj, on behalf of regional online jobs site Bayt.com.
Broadly, the survey suggests that regional internet users are, by and large, extremely invested in the online world – that is, once you’re online here, you’re online for good, as more and more of your time becomes invested in doing internetty things.
Should we be pleased... or should we be scared?
The headline fear-figure – those that see online communication as disrupting their “normal” social activities – is 70% of respondents, while 80% thought online forms of communication were replacing social interaction.
Wow, we’re a bunch of sad, lonely geeks, aren’t we?
Pretty much every other figure trotted out confirms this view: 74% think the interweb has improved networking (the people type, not the one with cables) beyond what would be possible offline; 87% say internet news sources have replaced their political news needs “to some extent”.
This figure goes even higher when it comes to business news (90%) and leisure and lifestyle news (91%) – so good news for sites such as Arabanbusiness.com, Kippreport.com (and AdNationME.com...), along with whatever sites dole out “celebrity” news and the like.
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of people use email, and more than three-quarters of people look for jobs online. Fifty-seven percent use social networking sites and use the internet to listen to music.
These are all substantial numbers, but what does any of it mean in reality?
First, it’s worth having a guess at why Bayt.com and YouGov put together the survey in this way. Although the results have been construed – and, we would guess, the questions asked – in such a way as to give some good headline-grabbing, and possibly rather scary, figures, the intention is not to scare.
Instead, the overall impression is one of a very committed online audience, made up of people who view the internet as an integral part of their daily lives. They use it to talk, they use it to keep up to date – and they use it to socialise.
This, we suggest, would make many people see online less as the transitory, shifting medium it’s often perceived to be, and more as a solid, reliable method of reaching a solid, reliable audience – and, in the case of the Middle East, an audience which is more likely to be affluent and free-spending, if it’s got money to pay for an internet connection.
Considering that the firm commissioning this survey is an online jobs portal, it’s no surprise it would want to highlight these aspects of the online world – but it is just that: highlighting details that already exist.
“By conducting a study such as this, not only is it very interesting to see how and why people in the region use the internet, but it can act as an important source of data for organisations and authorities throughout the Middle East to see where any problems as to its use might lie, and then take steps to address them – in order to nurture an increasingly internet-savvy populace,” said Amer Zureikat, regional manager at Bayt.com, in a press release.
For a region that still lags badly behind in the internet stakes, at least when it comes to content and spend, this is an important point to make – the internet is here, and it’s here to stay.
It being the end of the year, we’ve had the obligatory “2010 will be the year of online” article
(though not by us) – and as ever, it’s less than even odds that this will actually prove true.
But more than ever, we can safely say that, beyond the qualms of the men who hold the purse strings, there’s now no reason for online to lag – and indeed, if used intelligently, we’d suggest it can offer greater value and more interesting results than many traditional forms of marketing or communication.
So, by all means scare us with your surveys, and tell us we’re all sad loners stuck behind our screens – just as long as it helps decision-makers understand that online might actually be worth a look sometime soon.
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