I would like to compare a visual to a literary universe. Why not? It has been done for ages, ever since visual media overtook written media in the popularity of youngsters. Therefore, it has been a myth to many scholars, why especially young boys are so fond of reading Harry Potter these days. We believed them to be completely wrapped up in cartoons and cyber culture by now, living in imaginary worlds, fighting themselves through levels of various (for adults) often unspeakable obstructions with the fast movement of their bare fingertips. No wonder so many fathers still buy their kids toy guns, hoping for their offspring to come out of their rooms for some real live action. But new fantasies for a new breed! After all, by now it is not the first generation any more to be babysitted into adulthood by TV and computer screens.
The similarity of the Harry Potter universe to Cyberspace is not as far-fetched as one might think. The topic and content is quite well-known and popular, as fantasy has various on- and offline fan communities through all age groups. J.K. Rowling manages to provide us with a world, as virtual as we could wish for. It has to be said though, that this comparison is only valid for the perception of youngsters today, because the appeal of Potterworld to grown-ups is a completely different one, as many scholars have pointed out so far. Grown-up readers have a much more emotional, if not nostalgic connection to the stories. But the experience of reading the books and the willingness of children today to read at all might have nothing to do with the process of reading itself and the conclusion that it will result in a greater enthusiasm to challenge books in the future. What if "navigation" through other stories is much more demanding? If social and moral competence is more important than innate talents, fight potential, sense of orientation and a detective-like combination talent? Are young readers willing, and even more important, are they capable of "active" understanding? Do their stories need episodic adventures in which they have to climb from one level to another, collecting bonus points, clues and tools for further use like in a "Monkey Island" adventure game? The more the novels move away from their basic structure, most prominent in the first three books, how much is really understood?
For some kids familiarity with this world might come from a very picturesque approach to reading, rather than a literary one. The kids navigate through this world like through a website. Maybe there are even blanks in their understanding of the story we are not yet aware of, due to their altered perception of text in blocks of meaning that represent images or a set of image levels. Even though the books grow constantly in complexity, they still draw a large crowd of readers of all ages. Can it be that for some young readers nowadays the awareness of written words can become a way of "watching" and not "reading" a story anymore? But maybe it is going a tad too far in the analysis to degrade the novels to picture books. With the right triggers, any book can become "virtual reality" in our minds. Harry Potter just happens to have a lot of these triggers. This paper is going to analyse and probably speculate about possible ways of perception and their attraction for kids. Maybe in the end we will discover, that these books were not written for kids at all. They are here for us, for the people thriving to search for metaphors, layers of meaning and analogies, while younger readers make sense of fascinating, intertextual Potterworld by means of their cyberspace competence.