The new digital "diet" of Italians

The lockdown has pushed a digitization, even forced, of the country. Now the effort is to safeguard this legacy and make it available

(Photo by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto) After the lockdowns, Italy has made a leap forward of almost 10 years in digital transformation. But now we need to think about how to manage the new online life of Italians. Incredible is the increase in expenses for smartphones, which have recorded an increase of + 450% from 2007 to today (with a surge in the last two years) and for PCs, which recorded + 89.7% in the same period. The use of devices has quintupled in 13 years and 55% of the Italian population (age 18-79) has an active digital identity. This is what emerges from the report The digital life of Italians made by the Censis socio-economic research institute in collaboration with Lenovo.

The pandemic, in short, has given a definitive boost to digitization in our country, which has always been the rear of this revolution. “In the period of the pandemic, people have turned to digital to give continuity to their lives, in various respects. We think about work, school, digital purchases and even medical consultancy ", explains Emanuele Baldi, executive cirector of Lenovo Italia:" This difficult period has helped us to fill part of the gap we had until recently compared to other nations . Now the perspectives are clearly different: just think that we have gone from an average of one pc per family to one per person ».

But what does this mean? What will be the natural evolution of this digitization according to the manufacturing companies? "In twenty or thirty years, PCs will become real communication hubs in our homes, so we have the task of making the tools that will be part of the future digital life of Italians ever better". The projection on the future speaks to us of increasingly intelligent computers: "They must have at least five characteristics: always ready to use, with a battery that will last all day, always online, always adaptable, thanks to the artificial intelligence that will transform the way people work. use, which perhaps will be through the hands or the voice, increasingly confident and fashionable », continues Baldi. The target? A digital and increasingly inclusive way, in spite of what has been thought so far of digitization, often blamed for dividing people, instead of uniting them.

The pandemic has taught Italians that digital devices shorten distances, even when it is not possible to see each other in person, as in the extreme case of the lockdown. "The survey showed that digital devices improve people's lives - explains Massimiliano Valerii, general manager of Censis - and 85.3% of citizens hope that in the near future it will be possible to communicate via email with public offices, 85% that documents and certificates can be requested online, 83.2% that they can pay taxes, bulletins and fines online in a simple and fast way ". In short, we have developed new expectations compared to before the pandemic.

But now we need to think about how to manage it: the limits are many, from the regulations, which still speak to a non-digital country, to the need to guarantee first continuity and then an evolution - such as 5G - to all the services offered by companies, up to the great challenge: that of privacy. Surely a revolution that is just waiting to take off, given that 70.4% of Italians are convinced that digitization has improved the quality of their life. «In this highly advanced scenario of digitization, in our country there are still 4.3 million users of devices without a connection, and 13.2 million Italians have connection problems. Finally, there are a total of 24 million Italians who are not fully at ease in the digital ecosystem, who struggle to use forms of instant messaging or e-mail, who do not know how to make payments online or who cannot make video calls " , concludes Valerii. A fact that cannot be ignored in order to implement the desired real digital change.


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Topics

Digital business Italy Digital payments globalData.fldTopic = "Digital business, Italy, Digital payments "

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