Mary is a 45-year old white woman of Ukrainian ancestry, who lives by herself in a rented apartment in Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill section. Chestnut Hill has a reputation as a wealthy community with large stone mansions on large wooded lots and "classy" shops. Mary lives in a small 4-unit apartment building in one of Chestnut Hill's middle-class neighborhoods, near a train station, but otherwise all residential. Her neighbors are mostly individuals and small families, mostly white.

Mary has a Master's degree in social work, and is a former therapist and social worker. She currently is in private practice as an Employee Assistance consultant, providing her clients with training and consulting advice on workplace issues, including domestic violence, alcoholism and drug use. She also does Spanish tutoring on a limited basis. She earns about $50, 000 per year, and works out of an office in her home.

Free Time: In her free time Mary is a former competitive body builder, who likes to work out at a gym. She enjoys the social and health aspects of competing against herself and "making the young men look bad." She also plays congas in an amateur musical group.

On television Mary regularly watches Jay Leno's show (but just the first half hour, because she likes his monologues), "Will & Grace" (because it's "very politically incorrect" and she appreciates its irreverence), and the "good moral-ethical dilemmas" in "The Practice."

Mary counts 8 relatives and 10 family members with whom she maintains yearly contact. She sees about a dozen socially or at group meetings or gatherings, and exchanges emails with almost all of her friends and some family members. She talks on the telephone or sends cards or letters by postal mail with almost all her family members and a few of the friends.

Internet: Mary recalls first using the internet in 1998, at work (in the corporate environment in which she formerly did her Employee Assistance Program consulting). She now uses a computer in her office at home, but does not own a printer, so she occasionally uses a friend's computer to print documents.

Mary spends about 10 hours per week on email, and an average of about 17 hours (ranging from 12 to 20 hours) per week elsewhere on the web. Each day she sends about 10 email messages and receives about 15 messages, only 4 of which are likely to be personal, one-on-one messages. The incoming and outgoing email is divided evenly between business contacts, members of professional organizations, and friends. Infrequently, perhaps once a week, Mary exchanges emails with two family members.

The number of people with whom Mary is in contact since she began to use email has increased, and she says the reason for this is that email is quicker and easier than long-distance phone calls. The quality of her contacts since beginning to use email has increased as well:

"Information gets exchanged, but personal stuff can't get conveyed [via email]. I can't hug my uncle [in email], but we do stay in touch. And when we do see each other we know where we are. We don't have to catch up on the news because that's already known from email."

Mary does not use chat rooms and says she has never tried instant messaging: "Don't see the need."

Mary's use of the Web varies depending on the projects on which she is working. She almost always uses a search engine, such as MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista or Bigfoot, or a direct link from her home page to get around the web. Mary mainly goes to sites related to her professional work, sites that are related to the Human Resources field and/or medical conditions with which client companies and their employees may need assistance. Her most frequently used site is the home page of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. She might go there to clarify the implications of a law affecting her client, to check on the status of pending legislation, or to look up the prevalence of a condition she may be researching. Another favorite is the site for the Society for Human Resource Management, on which she looks up Human Resource laws. Mary uses some professional sites consistently, but -- depending on the client for whom she is working -- she'll visit different company websites, and these can vary daily.

When she's not using the web for her work, Mary visits sites for news and current events, government and political information. She frequently goes to "venezuelatuya.com" for political and economic news from Venezuela, where she has personal contacts. She also connects through that site to a Venezuelan hotel's website, where she sends email messages to friends who work at the hotel.

In her most recent web session (several days before our interview), Mary went to several medical sites (of which she could not recall specific names) in order to check for information on certain personal health conditions: "Charcot's foot" and hydrocephalus. She was a little put off that the results she obtained used "medical terminology." -- "It didn't make me feel 'unsmart,' it just wasn't my thing." She also recently looked up a stock quote on the Yahoo website, and looked for press releases and reviews about the financial status of the company for which she used to work. It made her happy to see that these reports were negative, because she says she now hates the company.

Mary says that visiting all of these websites gives her access to information that is "usually more up to date than that in a bookstore or research library." Because they save her so much time, she says visiting these web sites has changed her life a great deal.

When asked to tell about something she found on the internet that made her feel very clever or intelligent, Mary said, "That happens all the time!" Then she told about a time when she was looking for sheet music for the conga part of a Venezuelan folk song. She didn't expect to find it on the internet, so she said

"I didn't go through all kinds of search gyrations. I just typed in the name of the song. It came right up! What a lesson in internet simplicity. You don't have to be intelligent to use it!"

Mary compares her internet usage to that of other people she knows by saying, "I am not as tech-savvy as some of my friends and more techy than others." She seems to be fairly comfortable on the internet, able to find what she needs with confidence, and can download and send files. She did not recognize the term "portal." When she needs advice on doing something new with software on her PC, Mary says her first reaction is to "curse." Next she works on solving the problem by using resources provided with the software, or by figuring it out herself. She also has relatives (including her Uncle Alex, who used to work for IBM) and friends who can help her.

If she were looking for information about a political candidate, she says she's likely to have gotten some information about the candidate from a friend on a Latin Democrats email list. If she wanted more information, she would follow links in the email information she had received from the friend. If she had not heard of the political candidate from her Latin Democrats source, to find information she would type in the candidate's name in the "search for" field on a search engine

There are limits to the information Mary will give out on the internet, since her mother recently "had her identity stolen." Mary will not use her social security number nor her credit card number on the internet. While she may use the internet to obtain a company's telephone number and information about a product or service in which she is interested, such as airline reservations, she will call the place directly to conduct business. "That's why the phone is there".

Interviewer: Carolyn Rahe