Facebook currently operates in 40 languages- from Afrikaans to Greek... but no Arabic... until now.
Although Facebook has been available throughout the Middle East since it expanded beyond the US college network in 2006, it will now be fully functional in Arabic. According to an article in the Guardian, "50 million of the world's 250 million Arabic speakers already use the internet, but Arabic only makes up 5% of global web content."
Considering the fact that there are currently over 300,000 Facebook users in Lebanon, and over 250,000 in Saudi Arabia- this should be an interesting trend to track. Social networking is often used differently in various cultural contexts... it will be informative to see how Facebook is utilized throughout the Arab-speaking world.
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Facebook's ability to respond and adapt to the social networking desires of the world is astounding. Across all parts of the globe, geographically close knit communities seem to disappeared and we have responded by giving ourselves a new medium for the same information; I like the way it was laid out by Park Chan-Wook in a 2006 NY times piece, although I think it has now moved on from this stage of evolution:
The article Says:
"'Because of capitalism,' [Chan] said, "relationships between people and their communities — family, or clan, or region — have largely broken down, especially in Asia." He had told me earlier that compared with filmmakers in the West, Koreans were "more sensitive about the tensions between individuals and society." The characters in his films, he said, were "bound to feel lonely and isolated from the world." That is why he often shows them communicating by e-mail or mobile phones, instead of actually seeing one another."
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09park.html?pagewanted=6&sq=park%20chan-wook&st=cse&scp=2)
For those of you who may have seen some of his films - Chan uses the internet to place his characters at a distance from others and create a sense of confusion. At the time, I think that Chan took a much grimmer approach to whole concept of internet based communities, but as Facebook has evolved and incorporated more elements, more languages, and security measures to enable some sense of trust in the system - it has begun to actually facilitate real-human contact rather than force interactions with internet based persona's that might be serving the needs of some isolated individual on the other side. Although I personally take a kind of hands-off approach to Facebook and use it like an extended address book, the purpose now seems to have moved away from filling a void of community interaction and actually re-creating the opportunity for real interaction in a world where chance meetings and knowledge of other's whereabouts just doesn't happen as often as it might in smaller communities. SIn this regard, I must say Facebook is really doing something quite interesting - and bravo for beating the crap out of that creepy myspace thing.
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