by Unknown
Harry, after the first of what would be many unpleasant encounters with Draco Malfoy, engages in a little retail therapy by stopping in to Scribbulus Writing Implements to get quill and parchment, and buys a bottle of color-changing ink that cheers him up (SS 79; HP2). However, as anyone who has ever attempted amateur calligraphy or ink drawing can attest, with the use of a quill nib and ink is a rather messy, slow and inefficient way of writing, but one that still holds a specific social meaning even in Muggle culture. With pen and ink, there is not so much emphasis on speed of communication, but instead on intention, clarity of the thought, and even an aesthetic quality.
Rita Skeeter of the Daily Prophet, that ruthless reporter/paparazzi figure who plagues Harry’s fourth year at Hogwarts, displays an example of a magical “upgrade” of the traditional quill which illuminates some elements of ideas from SST. With her marvelous and mischievous Quick Quotes Quill, much to the chagrin of her interviewees, Rita Skeeter is able to conduct and record interviews, hands free, and as a result is left with a suitably embellished transcript of the interview that is practically ready for press. Rita Skeeter’s quill has the ability to transcribe the words of speakers onto parchment without the use of the writer’s own hand. The quill races across the page and words begin to appear. However, it appears that Rita’s quill has some additional charms that render not a verbatim transcript, but Rita’s embellishments of the facts that give her stories that particular quality of sensationalism that her readers either love or despise. However, we can see an interesting parallel between the ideas of Bijker and other SST scholars when we think about the social shaping of the development of Rita Skeeter’s quill just as we can see the development of our own rather ubiquitous writing implement – the QWERTY keyboard.
As I muddle along communication to you through my tray of white plastic Chiclet-like keys, at what I feel is a snail’s pace, stopping to correct a mistyped word here and there as a result of my ill-timed, over-eager key presses, I think about the origins of Western Latin-alphabet keyboards and, in particular, the American English language familiarity with the QWERTY keyboard layout. Why do we not use sound recording and transcription? Why not carbon copies of quill-written documents or ball point ink?
That Rita’s Quick Quotes Quill not only transcribes audio dialogue and can differentiate between speakers (a feat even the most impressive Muggle dictation software and computer cannot yet accomplish). It has an added artificial intelligence in that it can improvise and embellish dialogue, an amazing feat in and of itself. However, if we apply Mr. Arthur Weasley’s admonishment to “never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain” (COS 329), we can perhaps more easily sympathize with Harry’s initial wariness of Rita’s quill. Yet even the Quick Quotes Quill can be seen as an example of SST’s conceptualizations of technology as emerging from the complex interactions among social, technological, economic and developmental constraints. The Quick Quotes Quill and the development of magical charms that influence its function revolve around several remaining inconveniences of writing with a quill: it must be manually operated and it requires a fixed physical intention to operate. That Hogwarts teachers assign essays in inch requirements as opposed to Muggle teachers assigning page numbers is yet another example of design constraints influencing social practices. As a teacher myself, I have often wondered if Professors McGonagall and Snape ever sighed when reading a student’s particularly large, wide-spaced handwriting the way I sigh when I get to the essay typed in 13 point Courier New font in my own student papers. But I digress.
As I conduct interview research on Muggle technology use, I marvel at our own rough version of the Quick Quotes Quill – the Livescribe smartpen. The pen operates with special paper made up of tiny dots read by an infrared camera at the tip to record handwriting strokes while a tap of the pen on a printed “record” button at the bottom of the page turns on an microphone embedded in the pen to record speech and sync it to the handwritten notes. It still can’t move through the air by itself though, and after a hand-cramping, three-hour interview, I still think Rita Skeeter’s Quick Quotes Quill has my Livescribe pen beat!
Hacking the Magical World: The Tinkerings of Arthur Weasley
Mr. Arthur Weasley serves as an interesting case study to examine the ambivalence around technology and technological artifacts embedded in the wizarding world. Additionally, the case study of Arthur Weasley can also serve as a form of critique of social shaping of technology in terms of providing an example of how tinkering represents the appropriation of technology by users. Mr. Weasley’s position with the Ministry of Magic involves the regulation, sanctioning, and control of any sort of magical modifications of Muggle artifacts with an emphasis on keeping dark magical items out of circulation. The office is also responsible for regulating the use of charms and other magical augmentations of Muggle artifacts for anything other than the artifact’s original intended purpose. However, despite his official role in prohibiting and discouraging the use and modification of Muggle artifacts, he readily experiments with magical modifications of various types of Muggle technologies, much to the chagrin of his wife and family.
As might be imagined, Mr. Weasley’s enforcement of magical law governing the misuse of Muggle artifacts is not always consistent. Displaying a more flexible conceptualization of magical law enforcement, we see Mr. Weasley enforcing the law more strictly for magical augmentation of Muggle artifacts when the witch or wizard being investigated is suspected of engaging in the Dark Arts than when he or she is not. Witness for example his multiple searches of Death Eater Lucius Malfoy’s Manor compared to his quick resolution of a disturbance at the residence of Order of the Phoenix member Alastor “Mad Eye” Moody. Moody had enchanted Muggle dustbins as a sort of security device to warn against intruders, and Mr. Weasley attempts to get to the scene to diffuse the situation before Mad Eye is detained by magical law enforcement, which would delay his starting of the position of new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. Unlike his repeated investigations of Lucius Malfoy, who he suspected of possessing Dark objects, Mr. Weasley does not conduct any further inquiries or raids of Mad Eye’s property as he considered his augmentations benign.
Mr. Weasley also appears to try to subversively assert special protections and lessen restrictions on his own tinkering via written modifications to magical law within the loophole he created in the Ministry of Magic to allow the flying of his enchanted Ford Anglia. His loophole allowed for modifying the car so that it could fly only if the user does not intend to fly the car (COS 39). This particular exception is an interesting example of Mackay and Gillespie’s (1992) ideas about the appropriation of technology and the conflicts between the intentions of designers and the end users.
Conclusion
In many ways, Mr. Weasley’s fascination with all things Muggle, and particularly, with Muggle technology, are understood by him – as with all of us – only through the lens of his context and existence embedded within his everyday world. His tinkering points out that no technology is a finished product, set in stone, but instead always open to re-interpretation as new uses are found. These new uses are always driven by social, economic, cultural, and political phenomena and, as such, are highly contingent on the time and place in which users find themselves.
By reflecting our Muggle world in the magical one, perhaps we can help re-enchant the technological marvels which surround us on an everyday basis. By doing so, we open possibilities of technology ever further. When we can stop seeing technological progress as a natural, inevitable process, we can better attempt to make technology more responsive to the needs of more diverse groups of people, in varied contexts, even those the designers of such technologies might never have considered.
References
Bijker, Wiebe E. 1997. Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mackay, Hughie and Gareth Gillespie. 1992. “Extending t
he Social Shaping of Technology Approach: Ideology and Appropriation.” Social Studies of Science 22(4):685-716.
MacKenzie, Donald A. and Judy Wajcman, eds. 1999. The social shaping of technology. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
Tsotsis, Alexia. 2011. “Obama: I Want People To Feel The Same About The Next Internet Breakthrough As They Did About The Moonwalk.” TechCrunch. Retrieved April 23, 2011, from http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/20/obama-i-want-people-to-feel-the-same-about-the-next-internet-breakthrough-as-they-did-about-the-moonwalk/
Williams, Robin and David Edge. 1996. “The Social Shaping of Technology.” Research Policy 25:856-99.
“Who’d Want to be Friends With You?”
An Analysis of Friendship Networks at Hogwarts
Katie Christie
Introduction
Due to the unique setting at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, an environment that serves as both school and home for the students, socialization and friendship play a large role in the daily lives of the students. It is therefore important to consider the ways in which friendships are formed and the role friendships play in the setting of Hogwarts. One way sociologists do this is by using friendship network analysis. In this chapter, I first examine research literature that relates to adolescent friendship networks, and then I present the analysis and findings of my research study of friendship networks at Hogwarts, demonstrating that wizarding networks can be analyzed using the same methods and procedures as Muggle networks.
Berndt (1982) cited three explanations for the significance of adolescent friendships. He found that biological, social, and cognitive forces are at work in shaping adolescent friendships. In early adolescence, the adolescent reaches a unique position because s/he is no longer a child, but also doesn’t yet have all the responsibilities or freedoms that come along with adulthood. The majority of social interactions in this stage exist between close friends and peers, and friendships are egalitarian. Berndt also discussed the role of intimacy within friendships, and how adolescents build self-esteem by sharing feelings and information with friends. In a later study, Berndt (1995) examined the influence of friends on psychosocial development as it related to school adjustment and found that adjustment is affected by the characteristics and quality of friendships.
McPherson et al. (2001) defined the tendency for people to have more contact with people who are similar to them than to people who are dissimilar as homophily. The idea of homophily is important because it says that people are more likely to confide and share with individuals who are similar to them. When the principle of homophily is applied to adolescents, the literature suggests that teenagers tend to associate with other teenagers who are similar in terms of behavior or achievement (McPherson et al. 2001). Sources of homophily include space, family ties, and organizational – including school –ties. Shrum, Cheek, and Hunter (1988) examined racial and gender homophily in children in association with grade level. Their findings showed that racial homophily increased as grade level increased, although the reverse was true for gender homophily. One of the most interesting and significant findings of this study was that children develop an early awareness of racial identity, and as they age, there is an increasing tendency to develop homophilous friendships.
Present Study
Based on previous studies of adolescent friendships, several themes appear to be consistent. First, the majority of social interactions in early adolescence are between close friends/peers, and these friendships tend to be egalitarian in nature. By combining Berndts’ ideas with Shrum et al.’s (1988) findings that young adolescents are more likely to spend time with members of the same gender and same race, my first research objective to examine whether or not this is true within the setting of Hogwarts, and how or if this changes over time. In other words, I will determine the extent to which homophily plays a role in the friendship ties among students in Hogwarts by examining the interactions occurring between friends who are similar in terms of gender and organization.
A second objective of this study is to determine how much power and influence Harry Potter has in his network of friends. I hypothesize that Harry will have the most connections in the network. The final and most important objective of this study is to test social network analysis procedures developed by Muggle sociologists on the friendship networks present in Hogwarts in order to set the stage for further sociological analysis of other non-Muggle social settings.
My study expands the sociological literature on adolescent friendship in that although there is a great deal of research available on cliques and group level analysis, studying of liaisons or other linking social actors, especially of non-Muggle social settings, seems to be rare. Most social network analysis includes information on cliques and isolates. Shrum and Cheek (1987) argued that examining liaisons in the social networks of adolescents, rather than focusing solely on cliques as the hub of peer relations, is important in social network analysis. They defined a liaison as an individual belonging to a social system, who serves the purpose of linking outside members to the system and clique members as participants in a close-knit group of interacting peers. They argued that distinguishing liaisons from cliques is especially important for contemporary theories of the school as a context for developing peer relations. Social networks can also be viewed as changing, adaptive processes (Cairns et al. 1995). Cairns et al. (1995) found that fluidity in the strength of friendships and group members is an important feature of social relationships. I aim to contribute to this developing area of research with this study.
Research Methods
The data collection process of this study involved unique procedures. Two networks were examined among the students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. To begin collecting data, a pool of potential social actors was devised. Hogwarts consists of seven grades, grades one through seven, with about one thousand students in attendance in any given year (Rowling 2000). For the first set of data, or Network A, a social actor was classified as relevant and included if he or she was mentioned throughout the recently published “seven volumes on the life of Harry Potter” (TBB xvi), beginning with the first volume. A preliminary list of social actors was drawn up by examining each witch or wizard who was named during the Sorting Ceremony at Hogwarts during Harry Potter’s first year. All students who attend HSWW belong to one of four Houses, which is determined in the Sorting Ceremony in their first year at Hogwarts. The four Houses are Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. Twenty-three students are identified during the Sorting Ceremony for Harry’s grade (SS 119-22).
The next step in the data collection process was to identify the relational ties between social actors in the Hogwarts network. From this pool of witches and wizards, relevance was determined based on who went on to be featured regularly in subsequent volumes detailing the events leading up to the Second Wizarding War. With few exceptions, the students who were identified at Hogwarts were mentioned in relation to Harry, and the vast majority of witches and wizards with regular mentions were in the same grade with him. Only sixteen students in Harry’s grade played an active role at Hogwarts up to the year of Lord Voldemort’s re-birth. These sixteen witches and wizards are the social actors comprising the first data set, Network A, and the relations linking these actors are ties of friendship.
During the preliminary stages of research, it was observed that friendship patterns changed throughout the students’ time at Hogwarts (which is to be expected as the witches and wizards age.) However, differences in friendship ties became especially pronounced after the formation of Dumbledore’s Army. Dumbledore’s Army is a club by Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger for students wishing to practice using defensive spells. The first network, Network A, therefore, consists of social actors who played a prominent role at Hogwarts and were friends before the formation of Dumbledore’s Army. Network A also represents early adolescence, as the actors in this network were between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Network B r
efers the ties of friendship formed after Dumbledore’s Army. Of the students who joined the DA, six went on to have significant roles in the Second Wizarding War; so they were included in Network B.
The two friendship networks consist of symmetric, undirected ties and a binary scale of measurement. To measure friendship ties between nodes, the presence or absence of friendship ties is determined based on the question, “Is node A friends with node B?” A score of 1 was given for a tie of friendship, and a score of 0 was given where a tie was absent. All ties of friendship were symmetric and undirected. In other words, if actor A considered B to be a friend, B also considered A to be a friend.
The network size for the first data set, friends before Dumbledore’s Army, or Network A, was found to be sixteen by performing a simple count of nodes. The network diameter was found by running the Ucinet procedure for identifying geodesic distances. Geodesic distances refer to the shortest possible path from one actor to another, usually resulting in the most efficient connections between actors. The diameter of the network was the furthest distance between actors, and in the case of friendship ties before Dumbledore’s Army, the number was two. The second network, or Network B, is comprised of all of the actors present in the first network, with the addition of six actors who were not present before the formation of the DA. The network size of the friends after the formation of Dumbledore’s Army was twenty-two. The diameter of this network was one. The change in the diameter between the first network and the second can be attributed to the removal of steps between social actors when more friendships were formed due to the actors’ involvement in Dumbledore’s Army. These results will be further explored and discussed in the next section.
