How Social Media Affects the Lives of UAE Online Communities

Over the last two decades UAE invested greatly in Information Communication Technology (ICT), facilitating them not only renew but enlarge ICT infrastructure via the employment of new technologies. Also UAE implemented a liberal approach towards ICT development, and opened its telecommunication sector to the business and to overseas investors, reduced internet restriction, effectively increased the capacity of operations and services to meet the demand of markets. This liberal ICT policy allowed to strengthen the country’s development and modernization. It is worth also pointing out that UAE not just lead Middle East and North Africa region in the use of ICT but country ranked as 29^th globally by ‘The Global Competitiveness Report 2016–2017’, annual report conducted by the World Economic Forum. The paper has examined the impact of social media on UAE online communities by giving sociological account of its use and consequences among local users. The paper has identified the key features of online communities and described different levels of interaction and participation among communities’ members. The popularity of such social media platforms as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, Snap chat and WhatsApp messengers will be explored in presentation. The subject of presentation is what users tweet at Twitter, what actually people post on Instagram and Facebook, and what kind of voice and text messages users are sending via Snap chat and WhatsApp; the ways users posting comments, uploading pictures, articles and video clips, sending voice and text messages will be identified. Specifically detailed account about post’s content, the amount of the types of the posts such as social and cultural ones will be given. Finally the idea of presentation is to explore how UAE’s communities actually using social media today, to examine the impact of social media on people’s relationships, with the focus on family, gender and consumption.