Accio Wand! iPhone 3G and Portus a Harry Potter Conference
This past weekend I attended Portus a Harry Potter literary conference. Part of the reason I attended was indeed my love for the series, but another part was the fact that Henry Jenkins was a guest speaker. For anyone interested in cyber anthropology (especially the flavor I promote here), I highly suggest that you take note of this sociologist and read his books ‘Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers‘, ‘Convergence Culture‘, ‘Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture‘, and ‘From Barbie® to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games‘. He’s as fascinating to listen to in person as he is to read on paper and I enjoyed his panels immensely.
Please continue reading.
While I was excited to go to the conference there was something else going on this weekend I was also excited about – the release of the iPhone 3G. My husband volunteered to get out of bed bright and early Friday morning to line up at 5am for the new phone at our local AT&T store. I met up with him there at 7 am after taking our daughter to school and waited for the next hour for the store to open. We were within the first 20 people of a line that stretched around the building. There was another AT&T store about a block away which we heard also had a similar line. The prior night my husband drove past one of the 4 Apple stores in our area to see people already lining up. To me it was amazing to see how many people wanted this product and were willing to go out of their way to get it.
Other than Black Friday sales and Harry Potter release parties I had never participated in lining up at a store just to get in to buy something. The feeling of standing in line with all those people is a mixture of excitement and almost dismay in that it is certain that there are those in line who will not be going home with what they came for. The demographics of the line were interesting comprised of mainly males between the ages of 20 and 35 with a few outliers in what looked to be the 60s as well as a couple of teens who made a quick buck selling their place in line behind us. This was quite the opposite from that of the convention which I will get to later.
We got into the store at about 8:15 as they were only letting a few people in at a time to prevent congestion. We picked out two phones and headed toward the back counter where we handed over our Sprint account information necessary to have our numbers ported over and then we waited. We waited and waited and waited. Yes, the servers had already gone down. Now I live in central time so in the US we were the second group to get the phones that morning and already the servers had crashed. However, we were not told this. We were simply told the servers were slow and to take our products home to activate them there. For almost two hours we tried to activate our phones to no success. Our Sprint phones by that time had already stopped working – we were dead in the water.
It is almost a scary thought to be without access to a mobile phone. You see, I’ve had a mobile phone since 1996 and I’ve had a ‘smart or PDA phone’ since 2003. I am definitely addicted to the ability to access who or what I want when I want and where I want – especially when I NEED to. I liken the sudden separation of me and my phone to being in the wizarding world of Harry Potter without a wand. As punishment for not being full-bloods the mudbloods were dewaned in book seven which meant in essence they were cut off from the world around them. I can say that that feeling is definitely familiar.
Without my trusty wand activated and after spending too much time trying to have it so I raced to the conference hoping to get there in time for the very lecture that inspired my attending the conference in the first place. Thankfully I arrived in time, though a little laden down as I had my laptop in tow with hopes I’d be able to use it later to activate the phone. I listened intently to the keynote jotting down notes on my blackberry unable to do anything with them more than that as twitter, sms, and my lj were out of reach due to lack of service.
After the keynote we were blessed with an extra hour sitting around talking with HJ about intellectual property rights, copy rights, fair use, and transformation. We also talked about how these things are interpreted differently by different cultures and how the US is at this very moment writing into global treatise and such enforcement of our copy right laws that could have very damaging effects on those cultures who do not adhere to the same ideals. Seems to me that the US is Voldemort trying to impress his ideal of how things should be done on the rest of the world. Bad form US, bad form. Especially bad form considering the global culture the internet has placed us in and the fact it is due to fandom fanning the flames of interest through fan works (fansites, fanart, fanfiction) that things like Harry Potter – a book written by a single mother in coffee shops throughout England – has taken the world by storm.
I of course am interested in how much the internet has played into the development and sustainability of Harry Potter fandom even AFTER the release of the last book. Now that we all know how it ends we are free to speculate on the nuances and meanings of themes throughout the entire series leading to more in depth and broadened conversations both online and in turn at conferences such as this. It’s amazing what can bring people together and the things they can accomplish due to the love of a story (consider the Harry Potter Alliance for instance – I had the pleasure of sitting next to Andrew Slack during the HJ keynote).
After the impromptu HJ discussion ended I headed down to the common area to work on getting my phone working. Again could not gain access to the activation servers, not only that but my laptop that just had its hard drive completely replaced (I’ve since renamed it Fawkes) started acting funny and crashed while trying to do so. A friend with whom I attended the conference did a lay-on-hands and bawong! the mac started up fine, immediately recognized my phone, launched iTunes and allowed me to activate it. Accio wand! I was connected again! And the magic my wand can do…
The goods: Nice colors, fast, ability to be on Edge – 3G – or WiFi, camera, application store, ability to store music and movies, youtube is awesome looking, Pandora is love, zoom, ease of use and the ever so lovely and so overlooked THREADED CHAT!!
The Bads: No Gchat, Y!, or copy and paste. Also, no outward notification of alerts to new voice mail/sms/ or email.
Overall: I am VERY happy with my purchase at this point and was very excited to have it in hand throughout the rest of the conference to take notes, pictures, and to keep in touch with those I attended with. I felt whole again!
Day two of the conference I attended a live reading by Jim Dale (the voice of the audio books) that was simply ASTOUNDING. Just listening to him and the crowds reaction was exhilarating – even at 9 am on a Saturday (while 9 is not that early on a Saturday for me 7 the time I had to get up to get ready to be there was). I was greatly impressed with the amount of people who turned out for such an early session. One thing I found very interesting about the attendees of this con were the demographics. Just guessing by what I saw and experienced I would say it was 90% women and the median age was about 35, which for a children’s book is both somewhat expected but somewhat surprising at the same time – especially the age part. After the Jim Dale session I was pleasantly surprised to see another session held by Jenkins and sat at the back of another very interesting though very similar discussion to the previous day’s.
Now it may have been the types of sessions I attended but it did seem to me that there were a lot of educators at this show. One secondary running them to Harry Potter and IP was how to use new media in the classroom and the fact that not many teachers had access to this media because it was purposefully blocked to disallow children access to potentially harmful material. However, by disallowing access to sites like Youtube they are also essentially cutting off great teaching aids that can be applicable to EVERY subject. Not only that but YouTube videos are also engaging and FREE. I know – I’ve used them myself in presentations both at work and as a graduate student.
There is also another point to consider here though and one that I hold very dear to the reasons why I decided to continue my studies into grad school. That is that there is a an ever growing cultural divide between those who have access to and participate in online culture and those who do not. This divide not only plays out in school, but does as well in college (or the lack thereof) and in the real world. Part of the problem is that those who do not have access at home have only limited access at school and in public spaces. It is my opinion that educators should take a stand and instead of locking up the internet they should use it in ways that not only engage students but also introduce them in a safe and learning environment to what the internet has to offer them in terms of education, entertainment, and just pure information.
Yes, it can without a doubt be a dangerous place – but not any more so than allowing them to exist in the world outside the home. It seems that there are great opportunities being missed here more to the detriment of children than anything else all due to the ignorance, neglect, and fear of the internet. There is no doubt that online culture has had a great effect on offline culture and will only continue to do so more and more. If the purpose of school is to get children ready for the real world and educators aren’t using the internet as a part of this process than they are not doing their due diligence to the disservice of the children and the public as a whole. I would love to develop a program that helps educate educators and administrative faculty on the benefits of the internet in the classroom. This is a subject I hope to go into more throughout my grad studies and perhaps as part of my practicum.
All in all it was a good weekend, filled with great intellectual conversation and lots of magic. I even bought a wand! (a wooden one rather than my electronic one) I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it to Azcatraz in 2009 but we are already making plans to make it to Infinitus at the Harry Potter Universal Resort in 2010. Maybe by then I’ll have a paper to present! 🙂