Euro Weekly News - Axarquia 18 - 24 July 2019 Issue 1776

FEATURE www.euroweeklynews.com 27 June - 3 July 2019 19
EWN
TECH FOR
THE TIMID
PRAISE the Lord and pass the
ammunition, as the wartime song
had it: Spain just reached 10th
place in the world’s digitisation
stakes. But half of us still lack basic
digital skills.
First the good news: Spain
knows its way around a mousepad
and touchscreen far better than
Germany, France or Italy. Half of
all shopping searches here are
made by mobile phone, though 71
per cent of the actual purchases
happen on computer.
We’re avid online buyers of
clothing, travel and books, and according
to the EU as recently reported
in this fine paper, Spain
joins Ireland in having made the
most progress in connectivity, human
capital, use of the internet,
digital integration and digital public
services.
Though anyone who has tried
navigating the snakes-and-ladders
of Spain’s bureaucracy online may
perhaps beg to differ.
The bad news is that one in five
people here are not online, and
So who’s a digital dummy then?
Not all of us have bridged that digital divide, warns Terence Kennedy
one in two lack those basic digital
skills. Given that most six-yearolds
could reprogram a NASA
space mission while playing Postman
Pat, that means an awful lot
of we more, um, mature people
who simply don’t know our Alt
key from our Enter.
And so many of us still make
such elementary computing mistakes.
For instance, we join the
23 million other people around the
world who use 123456 as a password
and then wonder why our
bank accounts get hacked.
Or we compose a borderline-obscene
e-mail to the object of our
attraction and then a ham-fisted
click sends it off to the wrong person.
(Note to the local tax authority:
I really didn’t mean to infer an
unnatural attraction to your earlobes,
honest).
At the other end of the scale are
those so terrified of the internet that
they miss out on all the good stuff:
cheap deals online, all the world’s
knowledge at our fingertips, all the
cat videos you can handle, unlimited
choice for everything from airtickets
to car hire to the sins of the
flesh, and and and…
It does all come at a price.
Those of us who have bought into
this brave new digital world face
problems our forefathers could not
have begun to imagine.
Our attention spans are shot,
we’ve forgotten how to remember
telephone numbers (or indeed how
to do basic maths), we text because
absolutely nobody phones
any more.
And we just keep falling for
stuff. Beware the next time a nice
man from Microsoft in India
phones out of the blue to offer his
kind help in sorting out a problem
they detected. You have been
warned. Again.
Humanity 2.0
WHY are some folks so
resistant to technology?
I know many who are
convinced putting a credit
card anywhere near a
computer will get their
bank accounts looted.
Older folks fall back
quickly on the argument
that if we all buy online,
our high-street shops will
disappear. They might,
eventually, but that’s not
our problem as we’ll be
pushing up pretty daisies
by then.
Some older people fear
social isolation, desperately
needing interaction
with ‘real’ people, not
those online.
For them I have news:
hordes of bedroom-bound
teenagers are in the same
boat.
At least you dear reader
could surely never be as
computer-illiterate as the
learner who was told to
press any key, but couldn’t
find one labelled ‘Any
key.’ Could you?