Electronic journalism offers readers new interpretative possibilities, explored here in Malaysia. Ludic hermeneutic accounts of media reception posit engaging in games as a metaphorical model for an audience creatively forming the meaning of a screen text. Accessing the internet, web users’ comprehension of virtual content is a seriously play-like process. Reading online is fundamentally purposeful or teleological (‘goal-directed’, albeit not by duty); concerned with other than the mundane (‘extracted’ from the everyday); projecting a ‘fore-structure’ for understanding, securing meaning; holistic (moving ‘to and fro’), integrating aspects of a text; and constructing cultural identity and power (‘fortifying’ self and status). But the ludic focus on developing meaning intrinsic to the virtual web co-exists with material world concerns. Marginalizing the former, internet users emphasize securing extrinsic goals: talk of mundane duty is foregrounded. Reading the screen, still productive of understanding (identity and insight), becomes liminally ludic, sometimes laborious.
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