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Staying in touch

Find out how one family uses the internet to stay in touch with their relatives and friends:

Salim, aged 38

Salim likes using the internet for contacting relatives. He uses the computer at home, to keep in touch with his family in India. He’s involved in planning a big family wedding there in a couple of month's time and loves using email to keep in touch with everyone and make sure that the plans are coming together. It’s certainly easier than getting on a plane! Because his family can pick up emails when they switch on their computer, he doesn’t even have to worry about the time difference. Salim has recently discovered how to make telephone calls over the internet to his relatives who have broadband which is great and free!

Farah, aged 12

Farah likes using the internet for chatting with friends. She wants to be a chemist when she leaves school and is working hard on all the sciences. She couldn’t live without her computer. Sure, it’s cool for homework and stuff like that, but what she loves using it for most is to Instant Message her friends. Instant Messenger means she can chat to them about anything and everything. She loves it because it is so intimate and quick and when she chats she feels as if her friends are sitting right next to her. She normally goes online as soon as she gets home from school to see who else is free to chat. At the moment she says she’s got about 100 buddies; some of them are her buddies’ buddies.

Zayid, aged 15

Zayd likes using the internet for keeping a diary. He loves using the internet at school but at home he doesn’t get to use the computer as much as his sister Farah—because he can never get her off it! When he does manage to get on it, he uses it to keep his blog up to date which he has on the Bebo website—which he loves. When he went on a student exchange trip to France a few months ago, he kept a diary of each day which his friends could visit when they wanted to see what he was up to. It stopped Mum and Dad worrying—even his Mum who says she’s allergic to anything involving computers had a look at his blog a couple of times to make sure he was OK.

Amina, aged 35

Amina likes learning about the computer. As her son Zayd says, she’s allergic to anything to do with computers but would like to learn. Zayd and Farah love showing her things she can do on the internet and she’s beginning to get more confident. She says this CDROM will really help. Amina’s talking about going on a course at her local adult education centre to help her get to grips with the basics. She says she’ll get there with practice and is beginning to see the benefits.

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