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Media Ecologies 71family, peers, classmates, and others might contribute to a young person’sfeeling of marginalization for having a particular niche interest, within aninterest-driven group the niche interest is what brings people together.Therefore knowing a lot about it, sharing unique infor mation with thegroup, or producing interesting and high-quality pro ductions (fan fiction,art, fansubs, videos, podcasts, etc.) are highly valued practices.Rewriting the Rules Rewriting the rules is a practice related to bothmessing around and geeking out. However, there are important differencesin the ways in which the rules are rewritten in each of these genres ofparticipation. Like messing around, which involves an inchoate awarenessof the need and ability to subvert social rules set by parents and institutionssuch as school, geeking out frequently requires young people to negotiaterestrictions on access to friends, spaces, or information to achieve thefrequent and intense interaction with media and technology characteristicof geeking out. Rewriting the rules in the service of geeking out, however,also involves a willingness to challenge technological restrictions—toopen the black box of technology, so to speak. This practice is most oftendone in the service of acquiring media—either media that are unavailablethrough commercial outlets (such as anime that has not yet been releasedin the United States) or media that are unavailable because of the costof buying it. Geeking out often involves an explicit challenge to existingsocial and legal norms and technical restrictions. It is a subcultural identitythat self-consciously plays by a different set of rules than mainstreamsociety.Many of the geeking out practices we describe in the chapters on gaming,creative production, and work involve youth engaged in passionate interestswho are concurrently innovating in ways that rewrite the existing rulesof media engagement. For example, fans of various forms of commercialmedia have engaged in their own alternative readings of media and createdsecondary productions such as fan fiction, video mashups, and fan art.These activities are proliferating online, and we capture some of this inchapter 6. Similarly, gaming represents a breeding ground for practices ofcode hacking, creating and exploiting cheats, and making derivative workssuch as machinima and game modifications. These forms of geeking outare described in chapter 5.