Experts discuss emergence of social networking in Arab culture
A forum of international experts in Qatar is working on an analysis that will delve into the causes and the impact of the proliferation of social networking in Arab culture.
“With the focus now on the role social networking has played in the revolutions [in the Arab world], understanding social networking from a technological point of view raises new data management and social computing challenges,” Sihem Amer-Yahia, a senior research scientist at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, Spain, said.
“We are witnessing large data volumes produced at unprecedented rates and the need to analyse social media is growing,” Sihem, the chair of the social networking roundtable, said, quoted by Qatari daily The Peninsula on Sunday.
“Information on the social web is massive and is characterised by a combination of factual data, such as scientific publications, and opinion data in the form of user-generated tags, ratings, and reviews. Users are both content providers and content consumers. Accounting for their preferences and biases is key to the effective exploration of social content and a building block for region-specific research,” Sihem said.
The forum has brought together 29 scientists from 16 countries, from both academia and industry, involved in research and development in the fields of social networking, social computing, and their applications, to discuss at the “Research on Arabic Social Networks: The Spring of All Changes” roundtable how social networking can be improved for users in the Arab world
The roundtable, sponsored by Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), a member of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, also discussed what can be done to improve social networking from a scientific point of view.
“Social networking, as embodied by Facebook and Twitter, played a vital role in the wave of change in the Middle East, where the ability to communicate, share, organise, publicise, and mobilise suddenly became possible,” Kareem Darwish of QCRI said.
For Kareem, recent events raise interesting questions about social networking that QCRI can explore, such as: “How do people find each other, and how can computer science facilitate people discovery? Who has authority in the social network? How does the social networking word-of-mouth travel across the network? How much does social networking activity spill into real life?”
