It finally happened. We have become a nation of Internet users. We who just five years ago we were the bringer of Europethe country with the highest number of people not connected to the Internet.
Also thanks to the acceleration due to the pandemic, we have become a people of saints, poets and navigators, as a famous saying about Italians says, but also navigators of the Web. The last, precious, Censis data say that 88 out of 100 Italians use the Internet and they do it mainly via smartphone. It means that the digital revolution is almost over. And the digital divide is almost over, the digital divide for which large areas of the country were without ultra-broadband coverage. Today if you want to experience being unreachable you have to go to some mountain village or on a rock in the middle of the sea.
In fifteen years, since the first iPhone arrived, everything has changed: for example, half of Italians have stopped reading paper newspapers and have gotten used to shopping online; WhatsApp, which didn’t even exist in 2007, has become a real social infrastructure which, above all through group chats, keeps families, school classes and work colleagues together to the point that sometimes you ask yourself “but how did we do before, without it?”. I’m gone habits that seemed indestructible, such as messages left on answering machines, faxes, postcards. The waits have disappeared, that time between one message and another which was necessarily hours, sometimes days, while now if someone doesn’t answer you right away and the double blue check appears, you start to get nervous.
And it disappeared there confidentiality, understood as reserve or the opposite of exhibitionism: today the winner is whoever talks about himself on social media every day as a successful person and “look what I did, look how good I am” is the subtext of almost all the posts we make. We wave the happiness and for this envy is rampant and with it, anger: the litigiousness, what used to be bar discussions that ended in the time of a coffee, on social networks become very violent fights where the victim of the moment is raged. Of this new world, 12% of Italians know nothing.