PERSPECTIVE
Information Thinness: Saudi Arabia
Abdulrahman Essa Al Lily
This paper investigates the possibility that many users of the mobile phone communication apps communicate with one another but do not necessarily convey or receive any information, i.e. anything that informs. A qualitative and quantitative investigation was carried out in Saudi Arabia, looking at how informative were the messages Saudi society exchanged over mobile phone communication apps. The main finding was that a large number of the messages exchanged among Saudi users conveyed no actual information or only trivial information. In other words, with the increasing ease of digital communication, users may over-use technology merely to communicate for the sake of communication, with no interest in actually being informed by anything, thus suffering from ‘information thinness.’