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transformations that tend to erase borders and barriers both of a temporal
and geographical nature [my italics].24
In some cases, ‘audience involvement and participation’ has taken
off on its own. This is especially obvious in the music business
where the agents of highly popular performers have invited such
sharing for the sake of image promotion and its subsequent finan-
cial benefits. At other times, performers, such as The Beatles, find-
ing themselves at the centre of such extreme popularity, actually
elected to make themselves accessible to their fans for reasons that
were not motivated by profit.25 Although it is not the purpose of
this paper to consider the political implications of audience par-
ticipation in the transmission of culture and cultural products, it
has sometimes been shown that power is not all on the side of media
giants or governments. The struggle of some segments of Harry
Potter fandom with Warner Bros is a case in point, proving that
even major companies occasionally have to make concessions to
public opinion on the question of who owned what rights to what.
Warner Bros made concerted efforts to monitor and close sites that
they saw as infringing on copyright phrases from the films but did
not reckon on the fans having formed a large and intricate commu-
nity. When it attacked small sites and individuals it regarded as
marginal and therefore powerless, it found itself up against a vast
array of fans all over the world.26 On just one site alone, www.fic-
tionalley.org, there are over 60,000 chapters and stories from over
6,000 authors. It also runs the Harry Potter wiki. All 60,000 of
these stories are adaptations of elements of the Rowling novels.27
Growing collaboration and participation are the order of the day.
Hybridity is a fashionable term. Commandeered by the automo-
bile industry to prove its new found commitment to going green,
it designates a vehicle that uses two different sources of power, most
24 Adaptation 4/2011 (Call for papers), Oxford Univeristy Press. See http://www.oxfordjournals.org//
our_journals/adaptation/adaptationandparticipation.html.
25 A good example would be The Beatles conscientiously answering their own fan mail in 1963–
1964 when the prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas Hume, had called them ‘our best exports’ and
‘useful contribution to the balance of payments’, Hunter Davis, The Beatles: The Only Ever
Authorised Biography, London: Ebury Press, 1992 (first pub. 1968), p. 304.
26 See Jenkins, pp. 185–187.
27 See http://www.fictionalley.org/press.html (facts about fictionalley.org).
ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE