Digital Media Europe

Digital media are an important part of the New Europe that continues to emerge after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the implementation of the euro in 2002, and the ongoing waves of immigrants from Africa and Asia. In the twentieth century, Europeans counted on print and broadcast media to help distinguish and coalesce their individual nations. But in the twenty-first century, they expect digital media to help drive a continent-wide economic renaissance, entertain them, and keep them in quick, inexpensive touch with the folks back home, wherever they may be.

In 2008, a trip across Europe would put travelers in touch with digital innovations such as Internet access on trains in England and planes in Germany; 3-D vivisections of Michelangelo's “David” statue in Florence, Italy; digital readouts showing passengers the 200-mph speed of trains in Spain; and six-camera security screens on double-decker buses in Edinburgh, Scotland. Moreover, mobile phones were so ubiquitous that some trains contained quiet cars that banned them, and satellite TV dishes protruded so thickly in some cities that they looked like rows of sunflowers.

Contemporary European officials are far less focused on the social responsibility of the press, the regulation of media monopolies, the quality of public broadcasting, or the media's ability to further democracy than in the past. Instead, new media must fend for and regulate themselves. New media are also expected to fuel technological and economic growth. “The strategic goal for Europe in 2010,” the European Council declared in 2000, “is to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.”

So far, however, the results of the digital media revolution have been at best uneven across Europe, with as many unintended effects as intended ones. Some northern European countries have a greater percentage of their population on the Internet than the United States' 71 percent in 2007, such as The Netherlands (90 percent), Norway (88 percent), and Iceland (85 percent). But some southern and eastern European nations lagged far behind on Internet diffusion, such as Ukraine (22 percent), Russia (23 percent), Macedonia (33 percent), and Greece (35 percent). Those nations, however, were among the fastest-growing Internet users. Macedonia's Internet user percentage, for instance, was 21 times greater in 2007 than in 2000. Nearly all the European nations, including those with the lowest numbers of Internet users, had mobile phone diffusion rates above the United States' 80 percent, although the only one to exceed the 26 percent rate of U.S. users [Page 413]of Internet-enabled mobile phones was the United Kingdom, with 29 percent.

Mobile phone usage in eastern and southern Europe does lag several years behind Western Europe, but the former are also abandoning or bypassing landline phones at an even faster rate than the rest of the world. As in the United States, the most intensive mobile phone users in Europe are adolescents. Most of the time, they are communicating with friends near and far by text messaging, not via voice.

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