Rhonda is a 40 year-old biracial (white/African American) woman, who lives by herself in an apartment in Germantown, a predominantly African American neighborhood in the northwest section of Philadelphia. She has never been married and has no children. She returned to Philadelphia two years ago after having lived abroad for 10 years in London and Amsterdam.

Rhonda completed three years of college, originally enrolling in a pre-med program, but after dropping out of school she became involved in the backstage aspects of music and theater. She now works about 60 hours per week for an audio-visual company as a production manager, coordinating A/V activities at a university for meetings, special events, and theatrical productions. In addition, she has her own record production company, for which she spends about 20 hours each week locating and developing new recording artists, managing the production and distribution of their recordings. She gave her income as being in the $30,000 to $50,000 range.

Free Time: In the little free time she has, Rhonda enjoys listening and playing music - she is a professionally trained pianist - because "it's fun, that's all." For the same reason, she also likes socializing with her friends -- eating, drinking, chatting and dancing. On TV Rhonda watches "Star Trek Voyager" for its good story lines and good drama. She also watches "E.R" and PBS's nature shows and investigative/historical shows, such as a recent one about Islam.

Rhonda keeps in touch with 20 friends and relatives, most by seeing them socially, and a handful by telephone contact. She does not correspond by the US mail, nor use chat rooms, and only rarely uses email for social purposes, and then only with one friend or relative.

Internet/E-mail: Rhonda does not have a computer at home, so she uses a computer at work only. She used to use a computer at Kinko's, and she still would if she didn't work as much as she does. She spends about 15 hours per week sending or receiving email, the majority of which is work-related. She sends about 15 messages per day and receives about the same number, with many of her incoming messages addressed to members of a group rather than one-to-one.

The number of people with whom Rhonda is in contact with since using email has increased because, as she says: "More people have email now, and these are not people I'd be in contact with otherwise, without email." Furthermore, she feels the quality of her contact with people has increased since using email. She thinks:

"...people feel more free in email. They "say more in email than they would say in a telephone conversation, which is unfortunate. People seem less inhibited since they are not face-to-face."

One person at work sends her instant messages occasionally, which she thinks are "a joke, stupid and pointless." Her feeling is that "...if I'm going to have an IM, I might as well talk on the phone."

Internet Usage: Besides her email use, Rhonda uses the web for about 10 hours per week, all at work. She categorizes her web usage as falling into three types: (1) checking on the new releases and "who's doing what" at the sites of competitive record companies, such as electra.com, sony.com, and acidjazz.com; (2) searching for new equipment for her AV work using a site called toolsforstagecraft.com, and (3) exploring and downloading chess games from freeware.com, to play by herself in her computer. She returns frequently to these sites, and occasionally goes to other sites, if she has a particular interest or curiosity. Usually she types in the address of a site and goes directly to it, rather than to use a search engine. She is familiar with the use of search engines, and uses "Ask Jeeves" when she needs one.

If she wanted to find information about someone in the public domain, Rhonda would first go to a site associated with that person and put their name into a search engine there. If she didn't know what site to go to, she'd "put their name in and put 'dot com' after it." If that wasn't successful, she would go to "Ask Jeeves" and look for information on the person via that search engine.

Asked to reflect on the degree to which the web has changed her life, Rhonda responded "not much." Smiling to indicate that she was being somewhat facetious, she explained that this is "because I have such a full life off-line."

Rhonda's introduction to the web was in 1998 on a friend's computer. At that time she "thought it was a pain, impersonal and hard to get around in." She still sees it as impersonal, not as hard to get around, and a good means of gathering information.

Rhonda has been disturbed by the presence on the net of such sites as uglypeople.com, where visitors vote to say who's ugliest, sites which display coroners' pictures, and "all of the teenage or underage sex sites." She says these kinds of sites make her feel "...ashamed that people need to spend money or time on this." Regarding internet experiences that made her feel excited or happy, Rhonda said that every time she finds what she was looking for she's excited.

Rhonda sees her use of the Internet as being different from that of others she knows in that she uses it more for business purposes than for entertainment.

In addition to the purposes already mentioned, Rhonda has used the web recently to investigate a health or medical concern, find a person's phone number or other locating information, look for a job, and locate political campaign or social policy issues. She has checked airfare prices on the internet, but hasn't purchased tickets.

Rhonda has made other purchases online, including the purchase of her own url, for her record company.

Interviewer: Carolyn Rahe