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As early adopters we look around today and perceive the world with difficulty without the benefit of digital social media and the Star Trek communicator - aka your smart phone as we once did with the toaster and microwave ovens. It's a fait accompli, we are hooked on this new form of news, entertainment and communication.
We were equally interested in finding out how our European cousins are integrating this highly versatile and extremely friendly technology. It is impossible to dismiss the fact that Europeans are possibly the closest to the USA in terms of cultural and technological adaptation trends.
At a time when the Cloud is at an all time high and Sex Tape (next year's release with Cameron Diaz) promises to be its biggest toasting friend, we turned our sights to the European continent for a quick scan.
Most sources suggest that Europe has heavily embraced social media, with penetration figures widely ranging from 35% to 57% on average and depending on nationality.
From all of our European allies, the Scandinavian nations are possibly the biggest enthusiasts with 3.1 million loyal Norwegian Facebook users (pop. est. 5.1 million), according to Science Daily.
According to Forrester Research, the French government sought to ban the use of Facebook as a generic word to describe social media in France citing unfair advertisers' practices. The report went on to flag the question "why does Europe suck at technological innovations?" This from a continent that gave us Fermi, Maxwell, Tesla, Lorentz and Einstein just to name a few from recent memory. Bill Gates warned of the technology gap with Europe as an issue more than a decade and a half ago and the Lisbon Strategy of 2000, legislated in the EU for internet technology education and funding, was recently viewed as a failure.
The European legal courts have been for months busy with class action law
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