A Quarter of the EU Has Never Used the Web 392
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."
Re:No States (Score:4, Interesting)
A state is any politically-distinct entity, which can be as small as a single town, or as large as the whole EU. The word is much more versatile than the particular usage in the name "United States of America".
The State of the Union address states the state of the state of states.
Re:The internet is an important right (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The internet is an important right (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, fail. In a modern society it can be challenging to get by without internet access. Take Finland for example, where internet access is a right for all citizens. Practically all services are handled electronically here. Banking has been done online for a couple decades (perhaps more, I wasn't living here before that). We do not use paper checks (how archaic), and the banks have had electronic kiosks for paying bills and performing basic banking tasks as far back as I can remember. I pay all store purchases with a bank card (debit), credit card or very occasionally, cash from an ATM. Today, the vast majority in Finland do their banking online. The last time I was in a bank physically, was when taking out a mortgage many years ago. I do 100% of my financial transactions at home, or any place I can have access via internet. All my bills are paid electronically online.
To the naysayers that will inevitably say they don't trust online transactions, I call bullshit. I cannot begin to count the number of transactions in let's say the last 10 years (must be in the many thousands), and not ONCE have I had an issue. It can be done if your financial institutions take security seriously.
Perhaps in some less well developed countries it may be possible to live offline, but I would say that if you tried to live offline here you will have a much more difficult time as practically all services are online. You may be able to live without TV, but living without internet access would be very challenging here.
Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia (Score:4, Interesting)
The Danish wikipedia will accept Danish sources, the English one generally won't. That at least seems to me to be the primary reason why the Norwegian wikipedia is sometimes better for things in, from or about Norway. But yes, for generic information I too use the English one.
Re:States? (Score:4, Interesting)
In Sweden, people would vote no about joining the Euro if there was an election TODAY. This is what the polls asked; I would probably not want Sweden to join TODAY (and I am a very convinced federalist), but whenever the bugs in the system have been fixed, then yes; Sweden should join.
Polling is a very interesting thing, since you can produce different answers on the same topic by just formulating the question a bit different.
Last time I saw any numbers about popular support for a USE-like future, this was around 20% of the Swedish population (and this is not just a few "insane politicians", but rather close to 2 million citizens). I doubt that this have changed that much, though even among these very few would say they supported a conversion to the Euro in the current climate of uncertainty.
Regarding having multiple plebiscites over and over again, Sweden have done just that about the Euro. When the plebiscite about joining the EU was carried out, joining the Euro was included in the deal; despite this the government announced a second referendum, despite that the populous had already approved joining the Euro (legally, Sweden has agreed to join but stays out using a loophole). So, yes, repeating plebiscites happens, but in this case, it was in the opposite way of what you are complaining about.
Secondly, about repeating plebiscites, this is not that strange. For example, if you run something through normal parliamentary procedures; different groups / parties may want to make amendments, and they often do this. This is obviously unpractical during a plebiscite, so if the population rejects a proposal of a complicated legal text, would it not be prudent to make amendments in this case? This is exactly the reason that parliamentary democracy is so much more superior to direct democracy in every kind of way.
Real Relationships (Score:3, Interesting)