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A Quarter of the EU Has Never Used the Web
smitty777 writes "Reuters reports that a quarter of the EU has yet to use the internet. Further, half of those in some of the southern and western states do not even have internet access at home. From the article: 'As well as highlighting geographic disparities across one of the world's most-developed regions, the figures underline the lack of opportunity people in poorer communities have to take part in advances such as the Internet that have delivered lower cost goods and service to millions of people.' The full report created by Eurostat can be found here."
I don't see how that's a problem. In Asia lots of people just go to internet cafe, if they want to access internet. Likewise, they do so for everything. It's a cultural thing. You want to do something? You go to place that offers that service. And they aren't pricey either, it's damn cheap. I kind of like that style too, it makes it social.
Members of the EU are often referred to as Member States. Or Constituent Countries.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Not all the world is the USA, and you do not have a monopoly on enforcing the meaning of words.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I did not know we had states in Europe...
Yes. In English the word "state" refers to a sovereign political entity. The "United States of America" referred to each individual state as an individual and sovereign authority over their own land. However, as the USA has become more unitary rather than distinct, the term "state" in a political sense has experienced a form of semantic shift wherein people believe that it means a political subunit of a larger country.
In fact, the USA as a whole is a state, Germany is a state, the UN is a congregation of states. If you want more fun, The Kingdom of the Netherlands is considered to be composed of four "countries": The Netherlands, Aruba, Sint Maarten, and Curaçao. These collections of smaller politically sovereign entities into a larger politically sovereign entity causes a lot of confusion in this regard.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Maybe, and I'm just guessing here, they just didn't WANT to access the net. And they almost certainly didn't want to be REQUIRED to access the net to get some services, for example. Personally speaking, we're only the FIRST generation to grow up with the Internet. There's one generation below us now that are the second. Everyone else has either had to learn very quickly or accept that they are past the stage where learning computers is easy for them (30 years ago, it was the exclusive domain of the nerd - and not everyone's a nerd).
Maybe, just maybe, they don't give a shit about the Internet especially when it's being shoved down their throats in preference to a) talking to human beings at good companies, b) doing your own homework instead of relying on an "independent" price comparison site and c) spending hundreds of pounds on something they'll never learn to use.
The best utility deals should not be only online, for a start. The cost of online vs paper statement is literally pence, no matter what the industry. And I won't use any internet-only business myself because it means I *can't* ring them up or send them a letter and get my problem sorted (my personal success rate of problem resolution by phone is about 90%, in person about 99%, by email about 10%). And if an older person phones up a utility company, they should still be given a fecking good deal whether or not they signed up online or not. In my country, the law is clamping down on things like that for precisely those reasons - the people most likely to not be able to take advantage of Internet deals are *EXACTLY* the kind of people who should be getting those rates.
Those at the poorest end of society are the ones worrying over 50p in the electricity meter, not which £1000 laptop they'll buy or whether their £20/month internet connection can save them £1.99 on statement delivery from their bank. But it's not about those people, it's about people who don't WANT to use the Internet for everything.
Personally, I *do* have Internet access to absolutely everything I need, and even did all but one present of my Christmas shopping online this year, but there are some things where I *refuse* to have a good service that serves a purpose replaced with a faceless corporate website.
My bank still want me to change to completely paperless (no thanks, I like to keep paper evidence and it'll cost me the same to print out my statements as it will them to print and post them to me - even though I check them online all the time), and don't want me to talk to humans in a branch (because they give me what I want/need most of the time). My car insurers need to have a phone line anyway so I can report accidents. My girlfriend will be getting a present bought *IN PERSON* because you can't buy jewellery over the Internet and know what you're getting (I would argue the same for clothing). In work, we still fax official orders because it has more legal weight. I used to fill my tax return in on the official forms and only ever submitted online once (for the final return I had to send when I stopped being self-employed, and even that I did on paper first to check their calculations).
Not everything works over the Internet, most importantly when things go wrong. When things go wrong, the website of the company in question is absolutely 100% useless, even if they are an ISP or hosting company (in some cases, even more so if you can't get online!). Give me the phone number of some middle-manager, though, and I'll have the problem sorted in minutes. The Internet is nothing more than a convenient shield from your customers and some customers won't accept that.
And some people, because of the way they work, just don't want to use / trust the Internet. In time, they will be obsoleted and everyone will start to use it from a young age, but until that time you have to accept that giving people *access* to the Internet is wonderful but you can't FORCE them to use it for everything. And, in fact, you'll learn that as you deal with more and more companies, it's the ones that provide a personal, human service that give you the most return on your custom, not the faceless corporate entities that hid behind a contact form and a privacy policy.
I'm always amazed when I see the number of articles on Wikipedia in different languages. The German Wikipedia for example has about 1.3 million articles, while the number of German-speaking people is about 100 million. There are *a lot* more people speaking Spanish around the world (Mexico alone has more than 100 million citizens), yet there are only about 850.000 articles in Spanish on Wikipedia.
I think the number of articles says a lot about internet penetration in European countries, because most of them have their own language. The Dutch Wikipedia for example has almost a million articles, while only about 30 million or so people actually speak the language. You see the same sort of ratio between articles to speakers in other nordic and western European countries. This ratio drops sharply as you move towards the east and south of Europe. People seem to be a lot less interested to add content to the internet in those countries. You could argue a poor country has other more important preoccupations, but people in countries such as Spain or Italy aren't all that poor, yet they don't seem to be adding a lot of articles to Wikipedia either.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
It doesn't say half the population. It clearly states half of "some southern and western states".
Lack comprehension much?
You have a good point. I actually live in Sweden one of the top tier countries but I was born and lived most of my life in Romania so I kind of know how the situation looks like. The problem with those statistics is that everything is showed in percent. 90% of Sweden's population is still less than 50% of Romania's population if you think of the number of individuals. Then again Sweden is indeed a more developed and richer country as are most of the west European countries. As the previous comment says people living in the rural parts of east and southern European countries have other, bigger problems to deal with in the everyday life that using the Internet. Most of those people can't afford the luxury of an Internet connection or a computer for that matter and there aren't Internet Cafes in all those remote Transylvanian villages for them to go to. Some of those remote mountain villages don't even have (or maybe they have now but didn't for a couple years ago) electricity or a telephone line, so for them the web is a thing of science fiction.
should not eve bother to give up :)
Eurostat is full of garbage: they mix data that was collected according to different rules, does not make sense to debate anything they publish.
Most of their data is crap. For example, a few years ago Eurostat put the percentage of internet users in Iceland at 97%, which would have included some 4000 toddlers. The data sent by Iceland to Eurostat probably meant that 97% of the population live in an area with internet access, which does make sense. Another examples: urban/rural are defined differently in each country but reported as being the same (most UK towns under 10k would be counted as villages in Rumania, for example), broadband is reported differently, infant mortality is reported by each country differently (for example, US and a few of EU countries report a live birth if the child has a pulse _or_ moves independently, while most of the EU reports preemies under a certain weight or height or age as "lost pregnancy", no matter how long do the children live after birth so those children don't get into the "infant mortality" numbers) etc. etc. etc.