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Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try-and too often fail-to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)

such informal teaching occurs across a range of other online communities.

we could talk about young anime fans who are teaching each other Japanese language and culture in order to do underground subtitling of their favorite shows.

If the current media environment makes visible the once invisible work of media spectatorship, it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being liberated through improved media technologies. Rather than talking about interactive technologies, we should document the interactions that occur amongst media consumers, between media consumers and media texts, and between media consumers and media producers.

On-line fan communities might well be some of the most fully realized versions of Levy's cosmopedia, expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture.

Fan women routed around male hostility, developing web communities 'that combine the intimacy of small groups with a support network similar to the kind fan women create off-line.' Discussion lists, mailing groups, webrings, and chatrooms each enabled fan communication.

That was the case when she dabbled in Fan Manga, which is a fan-drawn comic using existing characters but with newly created storylines. She had entered her work into a National Fan Manga contest that required her to use a manga called "Black Sun Silver Moon." Soon after she entered, she heard from the contest sponsors, TheOtaku.com and the go!comi publishers, that she was one of 15 finalists. Guests at the New York Anime Festival voted on their choices -- and at the ending ceremonies, she discovered her work had won."My fan manga will be published in the back of the actual manga 'Black Sun Silver Moon,' which is every manga fan's dream: to be published in a real one," she says. "I haven't gotten word which issue it will be published in but go!comi said they'd let me know."

Doujinshi arrests are based on three major dimensions: copyright, taxation and obscene expression.

First, doujinshi are not commercial products, and this is one of the most important distinctions that allows its very existence. 

Many doujinshi conventions (Comiket included) require doujin circles to provide print run information, and enforces a cap.  Quite simply, there aren’t enough books to export en mass. 

This is also why doujinshi has continued to grow while other media like manga, anime, and music have suffered with the advent of peer to peer trading on the internet…the doujinshi market is a collector’s market, where the physical book itself is highly valued

Japanese doujinshika---at least at this sort of amateur level---are often very leery of publicity. This might be a reaction to the arrests of several doujinshika in apparently random, token copyright enforcement cases in recent years (such as the infamous Pokemon doujinshika incident), or it might simply be a sign of how negatively "fringe" behavior is viewed in Japanese society

Snape is gorgeous---or at least that's what the djka at this show seemed to believe.

Doujinshika are infamous for "prettifying" real-life (or real-text) actors/characters, and who can blame them?

In Opera aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively and best

Over the first years of the new millennium these trends continued, with a robust market emerging that combined improved distribution with wider interest to generate revenue for some circles that could no longer be termed “amateur” in any meaningful sense.

The doujinshi market grew steadily via promulgation through the internet and pop culture media. This resulted in the viability of the doujin as a means of part time and increasingly full time employment. “Kojin circles” emerged, consisting of a sole creator (kojin) who handled all aspects of production and received all the benefits of income from publications. Larger circles formed semi-professional units to produce doujin software that would compete with professional releases. Otaku goods shops expanded their scope as doujin vendors, acting as proxy sellers for hundreds of circles both via brick and mortar outlets and via online mail order. Online-only doujin shops such as DLsite emerged, selling digital copies of doujinshi via download. Advances in printing technology and cheap, high quality labor (mostly Chinese) allowed for the proliferation of doujin items to media beyond the traditional books (and less tradtional CD-Rs), including towels, pillowcases, fans, cups, trinkets, and figures.

new class of semi-pro and professional creators