Users prefer WhatsApp and BBM to communicate in the UAE

Instant messaging is the most preferred method for communicating with family and friends in the UAE, data from new research on mobile Internet has found.

In a study titled ‘Calling Home: Assessing the Adoption and Use of Mobile Internet in the UAE’, analysts found that both expats and UAE nationals preferred using apps such as WhatsApp and BBM to communicate with their friends and family.

“The UAE has both one of the highest mobile penetration and internet penetration rates in the world, making it a very interesting case study,” said Yousef Khalifa Al-Ghufli, an analyst specializing in public policy and social research.

“The social structure of the UAE is also quite unique as there are so many people from different cultures and backgrounds who live together. We wanted to run a comparative study to understand if the mobile internet is used differently amongst different segments of the population and what these differences were,” added Tania Gupta, digital analyst, and graduate student at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

Highlighting the details of the study, Al-Ghufli said: “We used a mixed methods approach, where we started off with a survey followed-up with semi-structured interviews. We surveyed 158 respondents and interviewed 13 people.”

“Our study looked to assess how people in the UAE are adopting and using mobile Internet,” explained Gupta. “We used census and demographic data to build a sample that reflected the actual breakdown of the population.”

Al-Ghufli revealed that the mass media consumption habits of expatriates, who are long-term residents, are more similar to the mass media consumption habits of Emiratis than to the mass media consumption habits of expatriates, who are short-term residents, regardless of nationality. He also noted that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter remain the most preferred source of news in the UAE.

“The findings show how a technology such as mobile internet comes to play such an important role in the culture of a community or a society. There has been research done by as Rich Ling that looks at how mobiles come to play a role in everyday life. We wanted to understand if our findings reveal something about the process by which new technology gets adopted by people,” said Gupta.

Asked if there were any findings that came as a surprise to the researchers, Al-Ghufli replied that the fact that the mass media consumption habits of expatriates, who are long-term residents, are more similar to the mass media consumption habits of Emiratis, was a very interesting insight.

“One major example is the consumption of UAE-based news websites,” he said. “Over 23 per cent of long-term expatriate respondents and 22 per cent of Emirati respondents indicated that UAE-based news websites were their most preferred news source.”

“If we are to look at the bigger picture, we can see that the way mobile technology or any other technology comes to be adopted into a culture is very similar, yet the specific uses of the technology in every day practice is quite different,” Gupta noted. “Coming from a sociological perspective we start seeing the intermingling of spaces of communication that are real and virtual. What that means is technology such as mobile technology brings together the real and the virtual, even when different members of a household are not physically present.”

She added: “While with earlier technology led to interaction that was restricted by space, and not in real time, mobile technology is changing this to be more real time and continuous. This could mean the way we feel closeness or how we build our relationships with our family and friends would now be determined by how we communicate through mobile internet.”

“Generally, it is an assumed that Emiratis and expatriates are perpetually segregated. Nevertheless, long-term expatriates’ adoption of Emirati behavioral habits, that can be noted not only in mobile internet, but various other examples, illustrates a mutual appreciation and genuine exchange of culture. This makes the UAE such a unique and cosmopolitan place to live in,” Al-Ghufli said.