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Elaine Garcia et al.
According to the Spot on PR Report (2010), shown in Figure 1, the number of Arab internet users has
reached more than 65 million whilst Arabic Facebook users are now predicted to total more than 15
million.
Figure 1: Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA’s) top five Facebook communities source: Spot on
PR (2010)
Based on this report the largest number of Facebook users exist within Egypt followed by Saudi
Arabia and in both cases SNS have been used to mobilize collective action toward breakthroughs in
social, educational, economic and political contexts as discussed above.
By comparison in Iraq, internet penetration is amongst the lowest in the Middle East with just over 1%
of the population being able to access the Internet. Therefore the Iraqi use of SNS is relatively low
although there is growth of membership within the country.
It is important to note also that whilst there is an increasing number of Muslim based SNS these
appear to have relatively low membership and are not a preferred means of networking for the
majority of the Arabic population. (Dashan, 2011) The majority of Arabic users appear to prefer sites
such as Facebook which have promoted international use through marketing and the provision of 43
translations of the site. (Facebook, 2011)
The reasons for lower usage in Iraq whilst numerous are likely to include political instability and the
Iraq War which led to the destruction of the ICT infrastructure of the country which is only now more
thoroughly restored.
Due to the clear differentiation between these two countries this paper shall focus on Egypt and Iraq
as the highest and lowest users of SNS within the Middle East.
2. Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing
KM and KS have been the subject of much research and scrutiny in recent years. KM can largely be
defined from two perspectives. The first has its roots in the concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
subsequent Information Systems (IS) developments.
This perspective relies on the ability to codify knowledge in order to share it (Barnes, 2007; Snowden,
2005; Schutt, 2003) and therefore relies on knowledge in explicit form, not dealing with tacit forms.
(Hildreth & Kimble, 2002)
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