Karen is a 53-year old divorced white woman, who lives with her 12-year old daughter in a rented row home in a racially mixed neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, in the northwest section of Philadelphia. She has a BA in English, and has completed some courses towards a master's degree in public administration. She is an administrator/manager in a human relations firm in Center City Philadelphia, working about 50 hours per week.

Free Time: Free time activities include bicycling and reading. Karen also enjoys bird watching, which gets her outdoors, gives her access to the companionship of other birders, and she likes the challenge of identifying the various species of birds. She doesn't consider herself particularly skilled at any of these free time activities.

While not watching much TV, she appreciates Whose Line Is It Anyway for creativity, spontaneity and humor. Other favorites include The Practice and NYPD Blue.

Internet: Karen has about 20 social contracts, almost all of whom she sees socially, and maintains e-mail contact. She talks by phone with half of these friends or relatives, and sends birthday cards to about a third of them. Two of these are connected through group activities. Karen doesn't currently use chatrooms with any of these contacts.

Karen uses computers at work, at home, and at a half-hour a week of a library and connects to the Internet from all three locations. 6 hours at home and 5 hours at work (where she has a fast ethernet connection that allows her to buy gifts, get travel information and do personal research more quickly than at home. She has been an Internet user since 1996, having used it at work first. She thinks she probably uses the Internet more than most people she knows. "I sit at a computer all day, and I'm very comfortable with it."

E-mail usage consumes about 15 hours of Karen's week. In an average day she sends about 10 messages, all personal, one-to-one, and receives about 30, 20 of which are personal. Most of these messages are from or to work associates, but she also exchanges messages with friends, family and members of groups to which she belongs.

Because it's easy to keep in touch by e-mail, Karen has maintained contact with people she might have lost contact with before the advent of email. E-mail has increased both the number of her contacts and the quality of these contacts. "Because we communicate more often than we would have by phone in the past, we know more about each other's lives. So we speak or write in more depth than we'd talk on the phone-in infrequent conversations-before."

Karen has used chatrooms and instant messaging, but not much recently. She likes the fact that instant messaging is "free-like a phone call, but free," and that "there's more time to think about what the other person writes", but she resents the way that instant messages can interrupt her while working. Because she's not a fast typist, she also gets uncomfortable with the pace of instant messaging. Her chatroom experience is limited to two occasions, once as a way of expanding a two-person instant messaging session to include 3 family members, and once to participate in a 12-step meeting on-line. She wasn't particularly impressed or affected by the chatroom experience. She doesn't participate in interactive on-line discussions or bulletin boards currently, although she did spend a lot of time doing this when she initially started using the Web, when she says she was a "junkie." A long time ago Karen did meet a woman on-line, at a site where books were discussed, with whom she established a friendship outside the net. They've now lost contact.

Other than for email, Karen uses the Web for about 10 hour per week. While her interests are constantly changing, she frequently goes to travel sites to research and book business travel for herself or associates at work. She also frequently uses the web to look up names and addresses for her job. She uses the web for personal financial management, for entertainment information, and for researching health and medical issues that affect her family. She feels good about visiting altruistic websites like hungersite.com and breastcancer.com, where advertisers also contribute. Karen is excited by what she has found when using the web for genealogical work, and wishes she had more time to pursue such research. The web has changed her life (but only "somewhat"), by making it easier to do things, and giving her access to information she would not otherwise have.

Karen is able to help herself when using new software. She is quite comfortable on the Internet, and is familiar with search engines, downloading sending files. She was not familiar with the term "portal."

Interviewer: Carolyn Rahe