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Tiffany Kennedy

Looking at the ever-growing community of Harry Potter, we have seen a variety of changes since its first introduction, to today, especially when we look at how the internet facilitated this growth. Web 2.0 has changed the way that communities work and grow. This can be seen through the large fanbase of Harry Potter (Rowling, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005), which is one of many communities to grow up with Web 2.0 from an incredibly young age, especially in reference to the film fanbase (2001). First published in 1997, Rowling did not have a mass media marketing team for her first published book, there were no adverts or posters but a community formed, creating a media giant that most people in Western society had heard of. Rowling’s empire was built off of words, and not just the words that she wrote, the word of mouth was her strongest ally and with her fanbase growing up with the internet and watching it change, this allowed for the introduction of Web 2.0 to herald the fans, becoming one of the largest fan based communities. Through social media we can see how houses from the Harry Potter school ‘Hogwarts’ has created different communities online; that these communities band together through social media in order to share their same ideologies; and how growing up online specifically changed how this community was created. Looking against the background of works by Henry Jenkins’ “Afterword: The Future of Fandom” (2013), as well as Jenkins’ “‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance” (2015), and Cova, Kozinets and Shankar’s “Consumer Tribes (2007) I will discuss my belief of that the changes that occurred with Web 2.0 changed the Harry Potter community, to become a community that is not limited to the books that they gathered around, but a community that has chosen to allow these books to further their identity and growth as people, together.

From 1997 till now, The Harry Potter community has grown online to become one of the largest fan based communities. Those who grew up with the Potter series, mainly those who grew with the films, have expanded their ideologies and sense of community through the further development of the web. Rowling, the author of the series, has continually spoken about how her book had been rejected by several publishers before its initial release, which eventually allowed for a generation that grew up with the web to create a fan base online. This online fan base eventually lead to films, due to it being a large growing fan base, and with the addition of Web 2.0, later a dynamic community. Within the Potter realm, one of the key features is that students are sorted into different ‘houses’ at the fictional school of ‘Hogwarts’. This allowed for each child to gain an identity within this community, and familiarise themselves with something that was similar to their own schooling. As Web 2.0 was born in 2006, these fans were one of the first communities to use it to their advantage, especially at the age that they were creating their own identities. Jenkins (2013, p.358) discusses how the discourse surrounding Web 2.0 “has been animated by a hunger to develop a new, more empowered, more socially connect and more creative image of the consumer” which, when applied to the Harry Potter audience, has changed how this particular community works and has grown. Due to this change in the web, the Potter community found more ways to interact. One of the most common participatory subject at this time was the sorting into ‘houses’, as many created and participated in quizzes that were about exactly that. This caused the community to grow online and offline, as people searched for others who were in the same ‘houses’ as them, becoming “more creative” and continuing to be “animated by a hunger” (Jenkins, 2013, p,358) as they strived to belong somewhere. Due to Web 2.0 this was able to happen as these fans were “drawn together by shared passions…and often create new context by appropriating, remixing or modifying existing media” further solidifying their place in this community due to the ‘houses’ the would create content for. This change in the web allowed for fans to solidify their place in a community to ensure that it grows. Without this, I believe that the Potter fanbase would not have been able to become what it is today. As this has facilitated intense relationships with those online, as they are able to connect with each other, on a basis of mutual understanding, and mutual self-presentation in an online world where for the most part, are unable to actually see each other, thus creating an identity for themselves online. This identity furthered their beliefs on how they wanted others to perceive them, much like how horoscopes have no scientific basis on influencing our lives, yet many people still believe that they do, Hogwarts houses have the same effect on those that are a part of the community.

Twitter is one of the main social media sites that actively showcases what Web 2.0 is about. The read-write site, allows for people to hyperlink their ‘tweets’ through hashtags, connecting a variety of people together. This makes it easy for communities to form over the platform, which we actively see with the Harry Potter community. Hashtags on twitter have allowed for this community to continue to have a voice, which Jenkins’ talks about in the term “Harry Potter Alliance” (2015, p.206). This “fan activism” (Jenkins, 2015, p. 2016) is an interesting concept that occurs online when a whole fandom bands together in support or resistance of something, showcasing their solidarity on sites such as Twitter by using hashtags that support their community. Hashtags such as “DumbledoresArmy” and “Potterheads” have been used in order to show their alliance to their community, as well as hashtags to show their supporting sides in a later online debate, tagging “iStandWithJKRowling” or “BoycottDepp”. In 2017 and in 2018, the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, took to Twitter to show her support for an incredibly controversial casting choice of Johnny Depp in the series ‘Fantastic Beast and Where to Find Them’, a continuation of the Potter world. This created quite a stir with not just hardcore fans but those who just watched the film with no need to showcase their attachment online. As Depp has become a controversial figure, in light of the allegations his ex-wife Amber Heard made in their divorce case, many were unhappy with his casting. Rowling felt the need to defend this choice online, using Twitter as the platform to showcase her message, however, this backfired within her own community. Instead, the community that once was under Rowling’s reign, had expanded due to the web, and their ideologies expanded with it. The majority of this community who seek a role in activism criticised Rowling’s defence because it was not what the community was built on, and not what it grew to become. Using the algorithm that Twitter has, this become widely known through out the Potter community which lead to the more recent film in this world to become the least profitable film in the Potter universe. This is all due to the community that expanded beyond what books originally gave them, through the creation of Web 2.0. Jenkins discuss the notion that “fan participation might lead to enhanced political agency and civic engagement…they seem to offer a starting point for more contemporary work on fan activism” (2015, p.207) which is evident through the Potter community growing beyond the author that start their fandom.

The whole of the Potter fandom was built off of ‘buzz’. Due to Rowling never being published before, her success came from word of mouth, which later developed into words across the web as she continued to write and gain success. Cova, Kozinets & Shankar (2007) discuss the beginnings of the online community associated with Potter. Early on the AOL executive “set up a dedicated Harry Potter chatroom on the ISP homepage” due to his son continually insisting on this, well before web 2.0 came about. When web 2.0 started taking off the popular site ‘fanfiction.net’ started, showcasing all kinds of fan written content, which included “258,760 Harry Potter sequels” according to Cova, Kozinets and Shankar (2007, p.181) in 2006. This community continually growing up with the internet, pushing for more and more change within the limitations they were given online, eventually pushing the boundaries until web 2.0 enacted change upon the online spectrum, allowing for this community to grow as they continue to create. Fans “have invested time, energy and financial resources” (Cova, Kozinets and Shankar, 2007, p. 190) into this community that has been created and the online world allows them to push this further as many fans want. Growing up with the change in the internet, with the occurrence of Web 2.0, has allowed for communities to enact further change, to create websites and forums that allow for their communities to be communicate, learn and belong. The Potter community actively shows that, even though Cova, Kozinets and Shankar (2007) heavily discusses the relationship of fans surrounding Rowling, including the denial of information through the original printing of the series, they also showcase how in some areas during this time, the fandom grew beyond, doing much more than ever asked or thought. With this direct correlation with the internet, this community was able to spread across the world very early on. As Rowling’s fame start with what was a ‘buzz’ in Britain through word of mouth, if this community did not push the boundaries of what communication was available to them, perhaps Potter would not have spread as far and wide as it did.

There has been so much growth through the incredibly large community that is dedicated to the series of Harry Potter. Without Web 2.0 I believe that this community would not have been able to evolve the way it did. Through the ‘houses’ fans are sorted into, the online discourse of solidarity and the way in which those in the community grew up with the creation of Web 2.0, it is evident that this change has had an effect on how the community has grown. Henry Jenkins’ “Afterword: The Future of Fandom” (2013), as well as Jenkins’ “‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance” (2015), and Cova, Kozinets and Shankar’s “Consumer Tribes (2007) act as an aid to this argument. As one of the first large fan bases to grow as a community through Web 2.0, the Potter community creates an interesting case study. With all this in mind, it is evident that as the internet grew, those who used it were clearly able to form more awareness of themselves and others within the communities that they aligned themselves with online. Those in the Harry Potter community were really able to move beyond it to more than just simply fans of a book, but a true community where they have their own identities and relationships.

REFERENCE LIST

Aguiton, C., & Cardon, D. (2007). The Strength of Weak Cooperation: An Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Web 2.0. Communications & Strategies, 65(1). Retrived from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1009070

Cova, B., Kozinets, R., & Shankar, A. (2007). Consumer Tribes. Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Grudz, A. Wellman, B. and Takhteyev, Y. (2011). Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community. American Behavioral Scientist 55(10). 1294 – 1318. DOI: 10.1177/0002764211409378

Jenkins, H. (2015). “Cultural Acupuncture”: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance. In L.Geraghty (ed.), Popular Media Cultures (1^st ed., pp 206-229. DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350374_11

Jenkins, H. (2013). Afterword: The Future of Fandom. In C. Harrington., J. Gray., & C. Sandvoss (eds.), Fandom: Identites and Communities in a Mediated World (pp 357-364). Retrived from http://www.binaryspark.com/classes/Fandom/readings/Afterword%20-%20The%20Future%20of%20Fandom.pdf

O’Reilly, T. (2009). What is Web 2.0. O’Reilly Media Inc. Retrieved from https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NpEk_WFCMdIC&oi=fnd&pg=PT3&dq=web+2.0&ots=OZQCSbnDGT&sig=fMg7Ech6pCYPqyc3e1J7BMLUs8Q#v=onepage&q=web%202.0&f=false

Thompson, C. (2008). Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. The New York Times. 5 September. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=1