Charli

Charli is a 13-year-old, white European girl who attends a co-educational area school with almost 1000 children, catering for Year 7 – Year 13 students. She is in Year 10 and had to compulsorily take computers for three years but is not taking it this year. She doesn’t believe the keyboarding and touch typing skills she was made to do in these classes helped her with her computer interest or skill. She said that when she went on MSN for a week, that made her type fast. She turns 14 at the end of next month.

Charli lives with her mother and her step-father in a rural area of a city of about 100,000 people in New Zealand. Charli’s parents own a business at which they both work at. Her mother does the office administration.

Charli mainly uses a desktop PC at her home which is situated at the end of a hall (dead end) between two bedrooms, hers to the right and a spare room to the left. Her parents do not use this computer as they tend to use their work computer. She spends up to approximately 2 hours per week day on the computer and possibly up to 4 hours per weekend day.

Charli regularly uses MSN, and Hotmail. She has a few websites that she regularly visits to see what the latest is. She is a member of an online community, which writes poetry and prose and shares it with other members. People are able to view different categories in this community and write comments on others’ poems. Charli met many people through this site and from there, went on another site which allows people to create their own websites. Many of her associated friends from the poetry site have their own website on this other community. Charli has spent a lot of time creating her own website.

Charli has some very important friends which she has met online, and she calls them her ‘overseas friends’.

Charli plays soccer for her school and attends drama classes weekly. She is an above average student for most of her subjects, except for English (average).