According to ISTAT, Italian families remain separated from those of Europe.
The use of technology has increased in Italy in 2010 but Italian families are still lagging behind Europe with regard to Internet use and broadband. This is what emerges from this statement made by Istat on technologies and their use by the Italians. “Compared to 2009 – says the Istat – there is an increase on the proportion of households that own a personal computer (from 54.3% to 57.6%), who access to the Internet (from 47.3% to 52.4%) and that has a broadband connection (from 34.5% to 43.4%). Despite progress, however, Italy continues to lag behind many countries in the EU regarding the possession of both the Internet and the link quality. Only Greece, Bulgaria, Romania are worse than Italy.
“Our country – says the document – is at the twentieth place both in the possession of the Internet from home (with a penetration rate among families with at least one member aged 16 to 64 years by 59% compared to the average European 70%) and access through broadband (with a penetration rate of 49% above the European average of 61%). Regardless of this Italy is, with Greece, among the countries with the greatest increase in access to the Internet via broadband (both marked an increase of more than 24%).
Boom of social networking. “45% of Internet users use social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc..), 36.7% inserts
chat messages, blogs, newsgroups or online discussion forum and 26.8% use instant messaging services. “
Shopping on the Web. Nearly one out of three shop on the web. As emerges from ISTAT on ‘Citizens and new technologies’ conduct at the beginning of 2010, in fact, “26.4% of individuals aged 14 and over who have used the Internet in the 12 months preceding the interview ordered or purchased goods and / or services for private use at the same time span (6 million 685 thousand people). “
Less social differences. A narrowing of social differences for almost all the technology assets in question. For example, the share of households headed by executive, entrepreneur or freelancer who have access to the Internet rose from 78.6 to 84%, 2% (+7.1%) while among those headed by workers rose from 49 , 4% to 59.4% (+20.2%). Among the reasons why families do not have Internet access in the first place we find the lack of capacity (40.8%). 23.2% of Internet households considered useless and uninteresting, 13.2% have no access to the Internet from home because they access it from another place, 10.2% considered it expensive because the tools required to connect and 8 , 2% believes the link is of the high cost.
North-South. Families in central and north have the highest shares of technology assets. Personal computers, for example, are equally widespread in central and north (60%) and less in the South (51.8%). Moreover, in the center-north is found the highest proportion of households with Internet access (over 54%) and broadband connection (46%), while in the South and the Islands the shares fall totaling respectively to about 47% to 37%. Between 2009 and 2010 the technological gap between north and south of the country remained stable on all goods except the digital decoder.
Source: www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/12/23/news/istat_internet-10525578/?ref=HREC1-12