Kim is a 29-year old divorced white woman with no children, who lives alone in a rented apartment in Center City Philadelphia. Her neighborhood consists of townhouses and apartment buildings, about half of which are rental properties, and half owner-occupied. Income levels range from upper to middle. The residents are mostly white, mostly young professionals, with some retired persons and some students as well.

Kim has a master's degree in human services administration and currently works full-time (42 to 45 hours per week) and earns about $30,000 per year as the director of a small day care center. She is in charge of the center's general operations, oversees a staff of ten employees and has responsibility for the 37 children in the center's care. She finds this work exhausting and would like to leave this job in the next year.

She has recently begun a private business of her own as an image consultant, through which she provides both male and female clients with advice on wardrobe and personal grooming, as well as on etiquette and interpersonal skills. Her services include assisting with shopping for clothes and make-up. She says, "I help people recreate their physical self-image and improve their self-confidence." Kim has only been doing this work for five months, and estimates that she will make about $10 thousand at it in her first year. This second job consumes an average of about 22 hours per week of Kim's time. She would like to find a way to work full-time in the field of fashion.

Free Time: Kim likes to spend some of her free time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She also reads fashion magazines, which helps her keep abreast of current colors and styles. She also works out nearly every day, enjoying "sweating out all the stress." On television she finds stress relief in laughter, watching her favorite programs, which are "That 70's Show," "Golden Girls," and "The Simpsons."

Kim maintains contact with 5 or 6 friends or relatives, all of whom she emails. She only sees half (3) of these friends/relatives socially, face-to-face, and talks with two of them on the telephone.

Internet: Kim began using the internet in 1995, when she used it in graduate school. She now uses a computer at home, one at work, and several times a year uses computers available at the library. She spends about 45 minutes every weekday reading and sending email. Most of her email activity is related to two listserves in which Kim participates, both of which are related to her fashion consulting work. Of the 20 messages she sends and the 20 receives on an average day, only about one-fourth are personal, one-to-one messages, and these are all to and from friends.

Kim considers the number of people with whom she is in contact to have increased since she started using email. She says this is because friends include her in the distribution of email messages which are also sent to people Kim doesn't know. These others send their replies to all who received the original message, so Kim receives email from a wider circle of people than her own friends. This greater exposure does not have a long-lasting impact, however. Kim limits her own replies to those she knows personally. She does not use either instant messaging or chat rooms.

Other than for email, Kim spends about 6 hours per week on the internet, always on her home computer. She usually visits the same sites on the net, but sometimes will "branch off and follow links" that interest her. In her most recent session she was looking for both information and entertainment, and was on the internet for about 1.5 hours.

The sites Kim visits most often are fashionnet.com and monster.com, where she looks for new job opportunities. At the fashionnet site she also looks for updates on what is happening in fashion, what the designers are showing, and the like, because it helps in her consulting work. For its sheer entertainment value she also regularly visits a site for her favorite TV soap opera, "The Bold and the Beautiful", which she says is "easier and funnier" to follow by reading summaries on the internet. "I like to read about them more than I like to watch them."

Other sites Kim also visits regularly are: beautycontrol.com and makeupartist.com, both for their relevance to her consulting work, philly.com, where she looks for things to do in the city, and cdnow.com, where she listens to music and sometimes buys online, but only if the CD in which she is interested is hard to find in stores.

Kim usually gets to websites by typing or pasting in the web address herself, but she also uses search engines about half the time. On a whim about six months ago, at the infoseek site, she typed in the phrase "image consultant," which she had only recently come across and was curious about. The search results led her to the website for an organization of professional image consultants. Kim recalls that she felt excited "...to know there were others making a living doing what I'd only dreamed of." Her contact with this group has helped her start her own image consulting business.

Kim reports that she uses the internet more than her friends do. "A lot of my friends don't know about the internet or how to use it." Kim surmises this is because many of them have not been to college, have not been exposed to computers at work or in other ways -- or cannot afford computers. She says the effect of her regular internet usage is "not life-changing." However, she does credit the internet with helping her to plan several trips, on which she made important decisions about her life.

Kim considers her use of the internet to be primarily for entertainment. "It's not my lifeline. Not yet, anyway."

Interviewer: Carolyn Rahe