The Italians by John Hooper

Author:John Hooper [Hooper, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Italy, Nonfiction, Retail, Travel
ISBN: 9780698183643
Google: CcfzAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Family Matters

La famiglia è la patria del cuore.

The family is the homeland of the heart.

Giuseppe Mazzini

I described earlier how Italians, in general, have been slow to embrace certain new technologies. But there is an important exception. In one respect they were, to use the jargon of the trade, “early adapters.” When mobile telephones started to become affordable (and usable) with the introduction of the digital GSM standard in the early 1990s, Italians leaped at the chance to buy them. Even though the service providers in Italy balked at offering easy payment options for the handsets, forcing customers to buy them outright, cell phones were soon more widely owned than in either Britain or the United States. By the end of the decade, Italy had proportionately more mobile users than any other country in the European Union.

You could not walk down a street or travel on a bus without someone roaring “Pronto!” into one of those early, bulky handsets. But what was particularly interesting was what came next. As often as not, it was “Ma dove sei?” (“But where are you?”), which seemed odd. The whole point of mobile telephones was that you could speak from anywhere to anywhere, so why would a caller care where the other person was? I did not hear people in other countries asking this question.

It was the first hint at the main reason why, in a country otherwise deeply suspicious of technological innovation, cell phones were spreading at such an extraordinary rate: many Italians were using them to keep in contact with (and keep tabs on) the members of their family. According to an Istat study published in 2006, more than three-quarters had bought their mobile telephone because of “family demands.” On the list of other possible reasons, “work” came fifth.

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