Social Media, Wine and Burqa’s
If you haven’t seen the media regarding the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia lately, you a missing the new fashion for Blackberries. Businesses and individuals alike are panicking after the government has announced that all Blackberry internet services are to be banned. Basically this means the smart phones are about as useful as my brick of a Nokia phone – no e-mails, no messenger, no internet full stop.
This has come about due to the Blackberries threat to national security as anything done through the internet cannot be monitored. If you have lived in either of the above countries then your familiar with the ‘you cannot access this site’ message coming up on sometimes the most mundane websites due to maybe Wentworth Miller being clad in only jeans and no shirt (shock!).
So in this tech savvy world, and in a city like Dubai which is fast becoming a huge business hub this is not exactly an ideal situation and to be honest it’s quite scary to think that we live in a real life Big Brother.
When I think about the impact this is having on Dubai alone, I would hate to think what today’s society would be like if it wasn’t for the internet. Think how much it is used in the wine world – from ordering online and education to advertising and marketing through social media. Okay a lot of the old world wine companies haven’t conformed to the likes of a Facebook page or Twitter account but it only takes a minute to find hundreds of new world winemakers and a few old world ones employing this strategy and they are benefitting from this.
It was just yesterday I was reading an article stating that 20-30 year olds are purchasing more wine these days than their older generations and it’s not the cheap and nasty stuff either, it’s the good quality moderately priced wine. The biggest age group who uses Facebook are the 18-25 year olds, known as the ‘computer generation’ – this group is also more likely to spot trends and follow them so I wonder if winemakers have Facebook and Twitter to thank?
I don’t know about you guys but I think social media and wine is a good thing, and making the Blackberries over this side of the world where a veil – well lets just say there are a lot of unhappy people over here..
If you’re interested in reading more, check out this blog, hilarious stuff!