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Mondomatica

Domenico Natale - Contatto Linkedin

2000-2025

Domenico Natale

Mondomatica

mondomatica.eu (nuovo look del sito da fine marzo 2025)

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Curiosity… (Italiano)

Negroponte. The metaphor of air is effective: Anaximenes, around 588 BC, wrote: “air is the principle of all things”
Poster for the exhibition "Stazione futuro" Turin 2011

Various news from 2012 to 2015

Broadband in Italy
Average connection speed: 9.18 Megabits/s
Internet penetration: 58.6% of the population
Fiber optics in use: second to last place (Romania last)
ADSL up to 20 Mb/s: 80%
(from Il Messaggero, March 4, 2015, page 2)

The old book better than the tablet
Digital natives choose paper. According to a US study, they love the rustling of paper and the smell... underlining, scribbling, creasing the pages... In Italy, 84% of 16-24 year olds surf the net; from 6 years old and up, 21.9% do not use the Internet; from 3 years old and up, 54.7% use the computer.
(from Corriere della Sera, February 25, 2015, page 31)

The digital spread: one in three has never used the Internet
One in three Italians has never used the Internet, according to a Eurostat study published by the “Financial Times”. Italy is second to last, Romania last.
(from Corriere della Sera, Economy, December 18, 2014)

Apps, and the dictionary is out
A study by Skuola.net reveals how habits and customs have changed in the Internet era…an “app” to translate words…only 30% of kids…still stick to their old dictionary…60% of teachers are against the use of technology…in class.
(from Il Messaggero, Macro, September 13, 2014)

Infobesity
We are overwhelmed by an excess of information: data, text messages, videos, tweets. In seven years, daily traffic of emails sent has grown from 31 to 183 billion, tweets from 5,000 to 500 million, Gigabytes in eleven years have gone from 8.6 million to 1.97 billion. A mass of stimuli that the mind is not able to sustain. The experts' warning: "A diet is necessary".
(from la Repubblica, May 14, 2014, page 28)

Internet of things, Big bang of data
By 2020, the digital universe will have reached 44 trillion GB. The Internet of Things will cause the digital universe to multiply in size…between 2013 and 2020…from 4.4 trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion gigabytes…Data from connected objects represents 2% of all data in the world and IDC predicts that, by 2020, the number of connected devices will grow to 32 billion, representing 10% of all data in the world…in 2013, less than 20% of data in the digital universe was touched by the cloud, but by 2020 the percentage will double, reaching 40%.
(from Corriere delle Comunicazioni, April 21, 2014, page 26)

Italy, a brand worth its weight in gold
Only 17% of small Italian businesses have their own website, compared to 34% of small Spanish businesses.
(from Corriere delle Comunicazioni, November 25, 2013, page 2)

The brain's revenge
The simulation of supercomputers relaunches the investigation into the human brain, for a "friendly" artificial intelligence. We return to the approach devised in the 1950s by Alan Turing and then abandoned due to the excessive difficulty of studying the brain.
(from Corriere della Sera, October 20, 2013, page 34)

More than one in three Italians is offline and those who surf go slow
37.2% of our fellow citizens have never been able to connect, against an EU average of 22.4%... Italy has slipped to last place in Europe for average Internet connection speed. Just 4.4 Megabits per second, compared to 5.2 in France and Spain, 6.9 in Germany, 7.9 in the United Kingdom and then up to 10.1 in Switzerland… Of the 8,094 Italian municipalities, there is almost a quarter (1,700) in which just 3% of the population can access a home ADSL.
(from Corriere della Sera, 22 August 2013, Cronache pg.25)

School 2.0
In primary and middle schools…6% are equipped with multimedia equipment,... By 2013, 2.0 classes will increase from 416 to 3,000 (+62%).
(from Corriere della Sera, April 10, 2013, page 27)

The Anthropologist of Cyberspace “We Don’t Want Robot-Boyfriends”
Psychologist Sherry Turkle’s book “Together but Alone” provides a series of food for thought on the role of affective substitute that social robots play in the current super-connected era. “It is not a book about technology but about our progressive loss of autonomy”… on the robotic future, on the reign of connectivity, on social networks, on fragile sociality…
(from Corriere della Sera, February 26, 2012, Reading, page 7)

and Statistics

One in two Italians surfs the web
Internet users are growing, perceived as a freer and more disinterested medium. In 2011, it broke through the 50% threshold of the Italian population, settling at 53.1%. Print media, on the other hand, lost 7% of readers in two years (2009-2011), but radio and TV are still central.
The world of information in % of use by Italians:
- News 80.9
- Radio 56.4
- Newspapers 47.7
- Periodicals 46.5
- Televideo 45.0
- Google 41.4
- Websites 29.5
- Facebook 26.8
- Online newspapers 21.8
(from Televideo of 13 July 2011 at 2:00 PM - Source Censis, Report "Personal media in the digital era").

Earth-Moon CD Tower with 2007 Data
The distance between the Earth and the Moon, 384,400 kilometers, would be found by placing one on top of the other the CDs needed to store all the data exchanged and archived in 2007. In 2007, humanity managed to archive 295 billion billion megabytes, to exchange 2 million billion billion (from Il Messaggero, February 12, 2011, page 14 - Source Science).

Connections in Italy in 2020
1.2 billion connected devices: 400 million industrial products: robots, telephone exchanges...; 300 million personal devices: cell phones, laptops, iPads, cameras; 300 million devices for telematic homes: TV sets, household appliances...; 100 million intelligent services: electricity grid, water...; 100 million devices for intelligent transport such as navigators, traffic radars...etc. (from Il Messaggero, November 28, 2010, page 23 - Source Ericsson).

Italy needs a digital revival
Of the twenty-five countries of the European Union measured by statistics, Italy is twenty-second in terms of the percentage of families with access to the Internet at home (Istat and Eurostat 2009). Northern Europe has percentages almost double ours (in those countries 90% of families have access to the Internet). Italy is also twenty-second (out of 25) in terms of spending on hardware, software and services relative to GDP. A large part of the population does not have a computer and access to the Internet (Istat 2009), especially families of unskilled workers and those who live outside urban centers (from La Stampa, July 19, 2010).

The Digital Universe: Data Will Grow 45-fold by 2020
In 2009, digital information increased by 62% compared to 2008, reaching 800 thousand petabytes (equal to 800 billion gigabytes). In 2010, the overall volume of digital information will reach 1.2 zettabytes (a unit of measurement equal to 1 million petabytes; see Wikipedia). By 2020, data will grow 45-fold: this is what emerges from the IDC study “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?”, sponsored by EMC Corporation.
Faced with this exponential growth, the number of IT professionals will increase only 1.4 times.
www.zerounoweb.it (Newsletter June 4, 2010)

New media at the service of the Word

A recent study, commissioned by the Association of Italian Catholic Webmasters at the University of Perugia, shows that in Italy 86% of parishes have one or more computers, 70% have an internet connection and 68% of priests use the network to carry out pastoral activities (from La Domenica, May 16, 2010)

One family out of two has a computer, but we are behind on broadband

Fast internet is present in 96% of the country, but only 34.5% of families use it; in 2008, 27.6%. The European average is 56%, while Holland, Denmark and Sweden have a penetration rate that is almost double, ranging from 76 to 80 percent. (from Il Messaggero, December 29, 2009, page 11)

11 million Facebook members

In Italy, the number of users has increased by 2,712% compared to a year ago... in Europe, Italy is in fourth place, but holds the record for growth rate... out of 60 minutes spent online by European users, 2.5 are for the social networking site (from Il Sole 24 Ore, April 16, 2009, page 25)

Families (in order of %) who used the internet in 2007

60-40 Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Luxembourg, Finland, Germany, France
40-20 Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, OECD average, Austria, Spain, Hungary, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, United States, Belgium, Japan
20- 0 Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, Korea, Poland, Greece, Mexico
(OECD "The future of the Internet economy. A Statistical Profile", June 2008)