A representative example of the quality of information that my students find on-line is the TV show Friends, so enormously popular that the web is often tied up for hours after the show airs each week. Admittedly, the web coverage of Friends is notorious for the positive attention paid to it on the web, but this attention is also an indication of the show's popularity with students as cultural participants. In addition, the large sampling of web sites about the show would presumably allow more possibilities for critical treatments of Friends. Because of the popularity of the show, and its large number of sites, I chose it as an example of the types of information my students retrieve during their web research. Basically, web information about Friends breaks down into three main categories:

Corporate pages:

The first type consists of network home pages which generally contain graphics, bios, and memorabilia about television shows, but in a glossy, stylized manner.

Private Owner pages

The second type primarily includes privately managed sites which contain graphics, bios, and memorabilia about television shows in a less well designed manner than the corporate pages, but often with much more content.

Discussion sites

The third, and usually most allusive places for information were newsgroups and other discussion-oriented sites which actually engaged the subject matter of television shows. Often, students could not find such information.