Manama: Flashing her radiant smile that has carried her softly and triumphantly through life, Ines took out her mobile phone and snapped pictures of her daughter Oldos as she was presented the end of the year top school prize.
It was a particularly proud moment for both mother and daughter and Ines wanted to share it with her family, friends and people she did not know.
By the time Oldos with her tremulous smile came back from the stage carrying the award to her elated mother, her picture was already on Instagram and on Facebook where Ines had two well-fed accounts.
And by the time mother and daughter left the school hall, there was a deluge of comments and likes from relatives and friends
“I am usually a private person,” Ines said. “But I love sharing monumental moments, happy occasions and family achievements with others. I am not seeking praise or looking for recognition, but I do like the idea of informing others instantly about happy times in the family through social networks or microblogs. Besides, uploading pictures has become a very normal thing to do nowadays,” Ines, a family doctor, said.
Mariam, who just had a baby girl, waited only one day before she posted the picture of Leena on Facebook.
“She is my first daughter and using the social network was my way of informing my relatives and family about her birth,” she said. “I do not see anything wrong or unacceptable in uploading the picture since now everybody is aware of her birth. All the people I know are always connected to Facebook, so they did not miss the birth announcement. If I had not done it that way, many would not have known about Leena,” she said.
For Ines, Mariam and millions of other people, Facebook, Instagram and other social media are the most important and fastest ways to communicate, send messages and convey feelings.
They readily scoff at suggestions that the extensive use of social media reflected disconnection with the real world, an ominous decrease in intimacy and a tendency to live in a virtual setting of non-human relationships.
“I read about a Western research that concluded last year that people who regularly posted pictures on Facebook were suffering from troubled relationships in real life,” Ines said. “This is really far-fetched. It sounds like a joy killer to me. I regularly post pictures on Facebook and I communicate daily with my family and friends on Whatsapp, and I have healthy relationships in the real world. Of course my life is not exclusively connected to Facebook, but I do appreciate the significance of social media and at the same time I have no disconnection or intimacy issues in the real life,” she said.
However, several women in the Gulf have expressed shock over how lives that had been so private have now become so open for all to see.
“We in the Arabian Gulf countries are extremely particular about our private lives and this can be seen in almost all aspects, starting with the high walls of our homes to the way we behave in public,” Noor, a Bahraini clerk, said. “Yet, when you look at some social media, you have the pictures of our girls in European capitals or in resorts abroad, having innocent fun, but dressed differently. The idea is that many families no longer feel they have to live by traditional standards. The discretion that is highly valued here seems to evaporate steadily and these families readily share information about their trips and their activities. This is a tremendous change,” she said.
