Arabic Youth Mobile Usages in Egypt & Bahrain Mobile as “ black box” .. A Qualitative Approach

Abstract

In the last few years, telephone mobile usages have become increasingly popular amongst various social and age groups around the world. So this study aimed to explore youth special or secret   mobile phone usages,  functions , motives, and its social prospective through qualitative study on 60 young male and female belong to high economical class in both, "Cairo and El-Bahrain"  by in-depth interviews through socio-cultural framework which enabled us to understand what did youth do by mobile? more than what did  mobile do by youth?

The qualitative analysis of data showed that young people has four secret mobile phone usages, impersonation, personal black box, relations black box and amoral or illegal data exchange (isolationist and interactive usages). Isolation usages have been learned and developed through manufactory catalog in addition to learning by trial and error through Google search .Interactive usages, have been learned and developed by friends sand through real social network. Isolation and interactive usage groups usually take place in private zone as phone owner room but sometimes interactive usage group take place in public areas such as universities, schools, malls and working areas.

Secret mobile uses lead to more services complications through mobile phone companies and deepen loyalty of BlackBerry as an interacting access framework for young people. Running after new mobile phones "touch technology and smart phones" was motivated by social boasting more than secret mobile usages. Which mean that youth are more willing to develop his phone more than buying new phone to achieve secret mobile usages.

In spite of that our study was done in two different societies Egypt and Bahrain. It is hard to recognize the difference due to the great matching between the two groups , The phenomenon of similarity  referred to four  major factors , first technological factor , second social factor    , third political factor and ,finally educational factor we can say that "Youth in both societies  is  globalized  oriented more than local cultural  oriented " which bring them together depending on technological factor .

Keyword : Egypt , Bahrain, Mobile , New media , Youth , Sociocultural perspectives , Impersonation, Immoral .