On the whole, our participants kept in touch with people in their lives via all forms of communication, including face to face, phone and email.

The Internet and email seemed to be a large part of most of our participants lives. At least half of our participants seemed to be online all the time, and to use the Internet for a large variety of reasons. C11 said “i use it for everything except being outside.” C7 said he was online “all the fucking time.” C5 used the Internet "every day and it seems like for everything," and C6 said that she was online probably around eight hours a day.

Even people who reported that their primary mode of communication was face to face or phone, also used email quite often. This was true for both C1 and C5, with C5 stating that he used email quite often, but "it's not ridiculous, maybe 10 to 25 messages a day."