On Harry Potter and Communal Culture

When I was a child, mass media and communal culture were the same thing. It feels like yesterday to me, but those were the dark old days before cable and the internet. The media world was a much smaller place, and we gathered around our televisions for communal events that seemed to engage the majority of society. Watergate, the American ice hockey win at the Lake Placid Olympics, the final episodes of "Happy Days" and "Mash". Major television events brought us all together for a simultaneous experience, which we then discussed for days afterwards.

Of course, the world is a much bigger place these days, and mass media has split us into hundreds of cultural subgroups pursuing our own viewing or reading fragments at the time or place of our choice. This has been oft written about and is nothing new. This weekend, however, Harry Potter had me contemplating the joys of what we lost.

The seventh and final Harry Potter book was a communal cultural event like those old days. It's as if those scores of alternative options fell away, and for a brief space in time huge numbers of people were focused on the same thing. I felt a little thrill of inclusiveness as I bought the book Sunday morning, looking around me to see that every shopping basket in sight had its own copy. And though I spent much of my weekend alone, reading, that sense of inclusiveness continued. All over the English speaking world, people of all ages were doing exactly what I was doing, linked in the strange contradiction of the mass pursuit of an essentially solitary activity.

As ever when I get a good book in my hands, I plough on at speed. I was finished, satisfied and cried out, by noon today. And no doubt tomorrow the discussions will start, at least amongst those who had the time to immerse themselves for one marathon session. And for a few more weeks we'll have the joy of cultural togetherness, as people join in reviews, discussions and the mutual joy of a story well told.

Then we'll all return to our fragmented world, where only one in 20 of your friends ever seems to have seen or read the same thing you did at the same time. While I wouldn't necessarily want to go back to those days of limited media, I do thank J.K. Rowling for bringing back even more of my childhood than just the enjoyment of children's stories. Such simultaneous cultural sharing won't happen again, I'd wager, for a very long time.