I sat and read a statistics piece from German Ministry of Statistics.
They say from the 84-million in population....around 3.4 million Germans have never (ever) used the Internet .
They even have a term for the people.....offliners.
Back around 15 years ago, I went to a car registration office in Kaiserslautern. They'd be a manual operation all the way up to around 2006. I walked in one day.....the typewriters were gone...the fifteen employees were gone (they were all age 50 and above).
So, they had around a dozen folks....all in the age group of 18 to 24. Computers on each desk. Fresh, new and respectful prospective. None of the grump behavior that you saw before.
I asked the young lady I was dealing with....what happened. She grinned and said that the gov't authorities had announced that computerized registration was arriving in a year, and if the older employees would accept training. With the exception of the money-clerk.....they all said NO. They were quietly moved out....to non-computer jobs in the building.
My perception over this 3.4 million number? I would suggest that another twenty million are marginally capable of reading/writing emails....taking/sharing photos....and the weather/news. If they were to get a new router or printer....they'd have to pay some guy to come over and set up the situation.
It's not the end of the world, but it's a sign of how fast technology arrived, and that only half the country readily operates within this sphere.
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