Insights into audiences claimed by using a theory of their online activity as ludic clearly need to be compatible with reported experience of computers. This theoretical discussion is centred around people reading Internet journalism, electronic content located on the epistemological horizon between entertainment and information. Analysing their narratives of access, my thesis is that this process is play-like.

Dutiful Internet use with a worldly purpose is constrained in its capacity to liberate from the mundane. As instrumental (with an extrinsic goal), it is therefore less than entirely playful but more materially functional. Nevertheless, I show that such obligatory activity on the Web remains liminally ludic. It continues to effect not only a creatively hermeneutic purchase on otherwise indeterminate Internet meaning but the circulation of asymmetrical power relationships and the construction of collective identity.

My hypothetical account of multicultural media appropriation as fundamentally (if not entirely) ludic is tested by listening to Chinese and Malays talking in Malaysian focus groups about their experience of reading three online versions of newspapers. The virtual journalism accessed here was located on Web sites for the Australian (Melbourne) Age, UK (London) Times, and US (New York) Times.