I'm currently working on some new pieces about where to begin with anime -- a common-enough question, and one that most people answer by simply throwing out a list of titles. I'm trying to take a more nuanced approach, but one of the things that did come up was how many existing anime watchers are brought into the fold by a fellow fan. If anything, that seems to be the preferred way to do it.
This phenomenon isn't exclusive to anime, either. Back when I had a budding interest in horror movies, I let my friend with the Clive Barker and T.E.D. Kline novels on his shelf give me the tour, since he'd done most of the legwork or me. He was able to turn me on to stuff like Videodrome and steer me away from RawHead Rex (unless you wanted a laugh). Later, when I began developing an interest in Japanese culture -- with anime as a later subset of that -- I came across a discussion of learning the language which involved finding yourself a "living dictionary:" someone who spoke Japanese and could serve as a guide to knowing it. Same basic idea.
All of this took place from the mid-Eighties to about the mid-Nineties or so, after which the Internet became an increasingly large and irreplaceable part of all our lives. It's hard for those who haven't grown up surrounded by an envelope of instant information to have some idea of what it's like to not have such luxuries. Information about anime was very difficult to come by, and so the few people that knew anything or had connections tended to cluster together. That made it all the more important to cultivate a connection with someone in the know, or to get hooked up with some source of information -- a fan newsletter, an actual magazine, a convention's staff.
Now we have wikis and message boards and, yes, About.com, all of which contain distillations of the first-hand wisdom and experience of any number of people. They go a long way towards making it easy to gather facts and background about a show, and with many of them it's easy to talk to people directly and receive the kind of one-on-one guidance that used to only be possible in person.
I still think, though, there's a lot to be gained by being guided into anime by someone you know in the flesh. More about a person comes through when you sit across from them; you can pick up that much more about why they like this or don't like that -- things which might, in turn, shape your own choices without you realizing it at first. Those things often get smothered or filtered out completely online.
There's still plenty of reasons to use the Internet as a resource -- odds are you wouldn't be reading this, for instance, if you didn't think so. But there's something about having another person to lead you by the hand, in person. It leads to that much deeper an appreciation of the material, and that many more connections that can be formed with others over it.
That explains, at least in part, why anime convention attendance is exploding even while sales remain stagnant. It's the sharing of the experience that matters at least as much as the experience itself. And in my mind, that's still something best experienced face to face.
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