Kristen is a 21-year-old single white female who lives with a roommate in a duplex that she rents in an all-white, middle class neighborhood in Conshohocken, PA. Kristen is a college senior working toward a degree in business administration. She is also employed 60 hours a week, 40 as a waitress at a local Pizzeria Uno and 20 in a work-study job within her department. She uses the Internet in her work-study job.

Free Time: In her free time Kristen watches television, draws and paints -- and drives around to sightsee. She finds all of these activities "relaxing and stress relieving", but especially the drawing and the painting since she feels "skilled" as an artist; she has "taken a lot of classes" in art and she is "good with color". Her favorite television shows are youth-oriented and include Dawson's Creek ("I can relate to them. It's all about high school and how hard it is to grow up and the things you're faced with."), Friends, and Felicity.

Kristen reports a moderate-sized social network including approximately 25 people. She reports staying in contact with almost all of them on a regular basis by using the telephone and seeing them socially -- while maintaining contact with approximately one-half of them by email and letter writing. Email has increased the number of her contacts ("because a lot of my friends went away to school and it's just easier to email them") but that she feels has not changed the quality of her contacts.

Internet: Kristen has two computers at home, which are connected to the Internet via a regular telephone line. She also uses computers at work. She first used the Internet in 1996 at school.

Kristen estimates that she uses the computer for email about 5 hours per week. In an average day she sends only one personal one-to-one message and doesn't receive any in return. She also reports receiving approximately ten e-list or junk mail messages per day. Kristen does not visit chat rooms or bulletin boards.

Kristen spends approximately four hours per week on various web sites. Her three most frequently accessed web sites are disease.com ("research different diseases I've come into contact with to learn about them"), hotornot.com ("for entertainment to rate how attractive people are"), and horoscope.com ("check my daily horoscope"). However, Kristen also frequently uses the Internet for course-related research. Although Kristen did not remember any recent discoveries that "angered", "shamed", or otherwise excited her, she did report getting "excited" in 1998 when she "found out you could send e-cards to people", and getting "angry" in the same year when she realized "the fact that there's so many accessible porn sites".

Kristen feels her Internet usage differs from other people she knows because

"I'm not obsessed with it, unlike my roommate who spends hours upon hours a day...I don't pay my bills with it. I don't really shop with it. I like the joy of going to the mall."

She seemed moderately familiar with technical terminology and seems to be able to navigate the web well enough to suit her needs.

Interviewer: Yvonne Shands