Digital Portugal

These figures refer to data from December 2009, and are the latest available. Paradoxically, however, they do not point to Portugal as a “digital nation”.

This conclusion comes from the Centre for Investigation and Sociological Studies (CIES) which presented a study to the 11th World Internet Project (WIP) conference in Lisbon recently.

The WIP is an international project that looks at the impact of the Internet and other new technologies on social, political and economic aspects of a country.

According to CIES – which is an offshoot of the “Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa” (ISCTE) – less than 45 per cent of the Portuguese population actually uses the Internet!

Put another way, despite all the incentives and encouragement extended to people to buy computers and broadband Internet connections, 55.4 per cent of the population are still completely out of touch with the digital world – and of these more than half have no intention of ever trying to learn how to enter it.

The main reason given (by 44.4 per cent of those questioned) was lack of interest in the way the Internet works. Lack of knowledge of how to use it puts off 26.3 per cent of Portuguese, but curiously only 10 per cent put this down to the fact that they don’t have a computer, or Internet access. In other words, all the efforts by recent governments have only gone to making tools available. People still don’t seem to know how to use them!

Age, of course, has a huge amount to do with the data. The majority of non-users are over the age of 65 (more than 25 per cent), followed by 55 to 64-year-olds (12.8 per cent) and 45 to 54-year-olds (11.4 per cent).

This comes in stark contrast to other countries, for example the United States, where senior populations are strong users of the Internet - particularly war veterans of advancing age, who have set up and “attend” all manner of debate and discussion forums.

Also, the Government’s incentive programmes have always been more levelled at younger generations, who have taken advantage of the availability of new technologies.

One of the most significant details of the study – led by Metris GfK – referred to the Portuguese social networking habits. Hi5 continues to be at the top of the “top 5” sites, with 75.6 per cent of people preferring it, and showing marked resistance to the attacks by Facebook (which has managed to conquer 70.2 per cent of the user public). Twitter comes in 3rd place with 13.9 per cent, MySpace with 11.7 per cent, and Orkut with 10.2 per cent.

The study data also includes the LinkedIn networking site – one more geared towards professional business contacts. Although it attracts only 1.6 per cent of users right now, LinkedIn shows the greatest discrepancy among users: 80 per cent are men!