Dr. Amira Kashghari

It may seem obvious to acknowledge the spread of the information revolution and its impact on the lifestyle of peoples and individuals all over the world from its far east to its west, and from its far north to its south. The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century were characterized by a stunning information revolution, which in turn significantly influenced the redesign of the structure of economic, intellectual, educational, and social institutions. It also had a profound impact on the methods of interaction between individuals, as well as between individuals and their local and global social environment in various cognitive, economic, political, social, and cultural aspects.

First, it must be noted that most research and studies on informatics have focused on political and economic aspects, while the social aspects and the social change imposed by the information revolution have not received the attention and research they deserve.

 Studies that addressed the social effects of informatics are still limited, and this lack seems clear in the Global South countries which were mostly, especially in the beginnings of that revolution, merely recipients of the effects of informatics and globalization.

One of the most important manifestations of this information revolution is the speed of information dissemination and the continuous increase in the volume of available information and its dense spread among humans. Information was also characterized by its ability to reach the largest number of users easily, in addition to the ease of storage, documentation, and archiving. Some statistics indicate that internet users in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have reached 10 million users, and there are 4.6 million Saudi users of Facebook and approximately one million users of Twitter.

The presence of this large number of internet users, specifically on social media sites, naturally had a number of effects. As a result of the external communication provided by the information revolution, new fields were made available for the Saudi society to view the different cultures of the world, and the society began gradually to come out of relative cultural and intellectual isolation, compared to neighboring societies such as Egypt or Lebanon. On the internal level, the information revolution helped reduce the dominance of elites, and the role of the masses emerged in moving public opinion issues, as individuals became bolder in presenting ideas and discussing them transparently, even if their discussions were characterized by sharpness and polarization or - sometimes - by inappropriate language.

It is natural that the relative isolation of our society before entering the era of the information revolution necessarily leads to its impact on it being greater than in more open societies. In Western countries, for example, which enjoyed a degree of openness and intellectual pluralism before the electronic information revolution, the impact of new media there will not be of the same degree as it causes in societies coming from relative isolation. Also, the impact of the internet will not be as great on the individual's sense of freedom in those societies, because that space of freedom and the feeling of it already existed before informatics and after. On the other side, we find that the new feeling generated in the Saudi individual of the ability to practice freedom of expression and the ability to influence - whether this feeling was real or imagined - seems more clear in the Saudi society compared to other societies.

The greatest impact of the information revolution in Saudi society seems evident in the ability of this technology to impose a new pattern of thinking that overturns what we are used to of isolation and rejection of the other. Perhaps this is in my opinion the most important feature of the impact of informatics in our society. In any society accustomed to isolation traditionally, each group, regardless of its ideological position, feels that it is the legitimate and only representative of what is correct, and that it is absolutely impossible to imagine the existence of images different from what it considers correct and true; rather, even imagining the existence of this different image is of the inconceivable, let alone acknowledging or accepting it.

With the spread of informatics and the individual's exposure to different information and images intensely whether through the internet in general or through social media sites, many of these positions began to dismantle; rather, many of these beliefs shifted which used to see one image and not imagine the existence of another form. The information revolution also succeeded in opening new horizons through which the individual sees that all societies in the world have the same diversity and the same difference and even the same extremism. For example, we used to believe that Saudi society was free of AIDS and that the Saudi individual was far from the drug phenomenon, and other prior stereotypes which dissipated with the information revolution that provided live and continuous information about these phenomena in a way that became familiar and natural. Shifting these beliefs, even if it did not contribute to accepting the other opinion, it contributed to acknowledging its existence, even if that acknowledgment was accompanied in the beginning by fighting and attacking it.
Despite all these positive effects on Saudi thinking created by the conditions of the information revolution, there are negative effects that seem clear on individual behavior through their style of dealing with difference of opinion. The provision of freedom for individuals to respond to the different person quickly and easily out of fear of a censor or punishment revealed a painful amount of penetration of the style of cursing, insults, and personal character assassination of whoever presents an opinion or position different from what some believe is the complete truth. Dialogue and live interaction among the masses through social networks became an arena for personal lampooning and tribal and sectarian entrenchment, however, it is also possible to look at this phenomenon as a transitional stage that individuals do not overcome except by passing through it.

 The information revolution knows no borders; rather, it is one of the processes of demolishing traditional borders in the journey of re-formulating thought and behavior. It is a ship sailing towards a port that may take a long time to reach and may be intercepted by huge waves, but it is certainly a sailing ship without a doubt. It is a ship without a captain, and the leader in it is the one who managed to take over the tasks of directing its helm towards what serves humanity and provides it with more security and progress.