Internet Influence on Youth in Egypt and the Arab World

? Internet influence on youth in Egypt and the Arab world The Executive Summary The internet is considered as one of the most important and the fastest access to information, and for knowing the latest evolutions in different fields; with a relatively low expense, by comparing it with the other traditional ways, as journals, books and magazines.

And with the worldwide increasing diffusion of the internet, and its uses, both, positive and negative, and the appearance of the e-crimes’ era; it became necessary to know the Arab world’s and the Arabic language’s portion from the internet uses, in terms of the number of users, and the bulk of the Arab content on this network, accompanied with the acquaintance of the mechanisms and the ways adopted by the international society, the Arab world, and Egypt in chasing the e-crime and confronting it.

This paper aims to discuss the extent of spread of the internet using in Egypt and the Arab world, besides the extent of the e-crimes ‘diffusion in the Egyptian society, and ways of confronting it, in the light of some Arab and foreign countries’ experiments, and also attempting to know the Egyptian youth and the parents’ opinions about the most important positives and negatives of using the internet, trying to put a conception on how can the society confront such negatives and internet crimes.

The study was able to know the positive sides for using the internet, which includes the allowance of information in different fields for internet users, and facilitating reading the world news, and communicating with others in non-traditional ways, through chat rooms ? or e-mail, or other modern ways, which was given by the internet to its users, in addition to the possibility of distance education and training, and also distance working through the internet, which broke the barriers between countries.

Despite the above-mentioned advantages of the internet, but it’s not void of – as any modernized technology- faults and negatives, which can be divided into absolute negatives, as using the internet in order to inroad upon others and libel them, and also stealing banks and money laundering crimes, and into relative negatives, which damages differ according to the habits of people and societies, and the prevailing norms in it, beside the extravagance in using the websites of songs, games and chatting, which kill time and isolate the individual from his social surrounding.

And about the widespread use of the internet in the Arab world, the study concluded that there is a gap in the proportion of internet users in the Arab world, by comparing it to the global level, where internet users in the Arab world are only 1. 4% of the total internet users in the world in 2005, while the Arab population is 5% of the world’s population.

In addition to that, the information content on the Internet does not represent more than 1% of the information content on the Internet. The Internet use in Egypt has started in nineties, and the number of users in 1996/1997 was about 75 thousand user. With the establishment of the Ministry of Communications and Information in 1999 and a result of the efforts made in this area, the number of internet users became 4. 4 million in 2004.