In his article entitled, “Harry Potter’s World as a Morality Tale of Technology and Media,” Nicholas Sheltrown encourages the reader and viewer of Harry Potter to consider the aspect of technology and media in the Harry Potter series. Sheltrown argues that “Technology is not simply a popular fixture in these stories, reduced to the description of silly but fantastic gadgets; rather, technology is deeply embedded in the Character of Harry Potter” (48). He goes on to suggest that Rowling creates magical technologies that are everywhere in the series. Technology and magic have an interesting relationship in the series, he suggests; they often seem difficult to even distinguish. Sheltrown breaks down the relationship between magic and technology in the series, categorizing it into two parts: magic-tech and tech-magic. Magic-tech can be described as “ordinary items from our muggle world that have been magically modified, such as flying cars” and Tech-magic is described as objects that have no similar object in the world, instead, they exist only in the world of Harry Potter (Sheltrown 48). An example would be wand.
On of the most intriguing parts of the article was the ultimate belief of Sheltrown that “Rowling’s segregation of the wizarding world from regular technologies is critical in that it throws our dependency on these technologies into sharp relied” (58). Not being an avid Harry Potter fan, I think that I incorrectly judged Harry Potter because on the surface level, with the concept of magic that the school is based upon it is hard not to associate that with technology. My previous opinions may be the reason why I was initially skeptical of the argument Sheltrown was making. While I was watching the movie, I slowly adopted Sheltrown's belief. I as the viewer, was confronted with countless examples of magic, but rarely were there any technologies present that millennials use in every day life. In fact, if anything, Hogwarts seems to be technologically behind if you hold the magic constant: “Students at Hogwarts write with quills, parchment and ink. Their photographs, though moving, are in black-and-white. They lack electricity, phones, and other regular fixtures of the muggle world” (Sheltrown 57). When I was watching this movie, I was struck by how on target this statement was. In a world where technology has come to be so entrenched in our everyday lives, viewers would be hard-pressed to find many examples of these common technologies.
Millennials have been cast as a technologically savvy generation, yet here we are, relating to story that involves hardly any technology. What does the lack of technology in this series, in combination with the millennial obsession with Harry Potter suggest about our generation? Does it make sense that the millennials are turning to a fantasy world lacking technology? These questions are much more than yes or no questions, but they are certainly ones that I was thinking about during the screening and hope to discuss in class.
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