Digitization is not a foreign word for most Austrian seniors. On the contrary: the majority of retirees have access to the digital world and also use it. This emerges from a study published this week by the market researcher GfK on behalf of the telecom group A1. 500 Austrians between the ages of 60 and 80 were interviewed.
“The most important study findings are that almost all seniors have a mobile phone and more than half also use a laptop or notebook,” says Marcus Grausam, head of A1 Austria. For the company, these are “exciting numbers”, also with regard to fiber optic expansion. A1 invests 500 million euros a year in Austria, fiber optics know no age, says Grausam.
98 percent of those surveyed use a mobile phone or smartphone, 56 percent laptop or notebook, 14 percent smartwatch or fitness band. Nine out of ten seniors use the internet, most of them via mobile phones and laptops.
Two thirds of the older generation of Internet users send e-mails, get information, take photos or record videos. Just as many users used various applications on the Internet to support contact maintenance during the corona pandemic. Social media (32 percent) and music streaming (15 percent) play a supporting role.
Where is the problem
A third of retirees complained that the biggest challenge at the moment was the lack of basic knowledge of digitization. Only then do the topics “too complicated” (19 percent), “the older generation didn’t grow up with it” (14), that “a lot of things can only be done digitally” (eleven), the “speed of digitization” (ten) or the “Access to digitization per se” (ten).
Source: Nachrichten
