Almost every building is rather precariously built and even absurd in details, because there is no value put in structural engineering, you just magic it all together.
Why ever would they use the Internet? They all perceive their own culture to be superior, and all their advances are bound up in magic.
But demanding that fiction predict the future is unreasonable and will cause upset for you and the authors. Almost all speculative fiction is based on "what if": imagine if there was something different about the world or or our technological capabilities, what stories could we tell about them?
(That's not even counting the SFF that makes no claim to be about the future or reality, but simply brings in elements for dramatic effect. That's why you can hear things in film space battles, which tend to be organised like WW2 carrier/air battles. That's why Harry Potter books make no attempt at consistency.)
As in, you're impressed that someone writing in the 1950s predicted information warfare?
Yes, they even go bing when a new message arrives.
It's a 'forbidden library' because the books in there aren't meant to be available to the general public. You'd expect it to be locked down against scrying and other forms of remote and unauthorized access, in exactly the same way that a military data center would be locked down.
That said, I think it would've been dramatically less pleasing for Harry to whip out his Nokia for the camera flashlight, instead of simply uttering 'lumos'.
° Please correct me if I am wrong for my HP knowledge is rather rusty indeed.
It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work. Flash photography works, so capacitors are seemingly okay. Even a simple one-wire telegraph system would be an improvement on owls.
Come to think of it, we come across actual magical radio broadcasts at several points. Even magical password-protection of same. Why the hell do they still use owls?
It's a fair question though - anecdotally, the two main uses for the postal service nowadays (in countries with internet access) are package deliveries and unsolicited marketing (possibly print subscriptions factor in).
To my mind, the unique advantage of the Muggle postal service for personal communications, apart from the globally federated physical distribution network - the one that would make me very hesitant to scrap it - is the difficulty of conducting mass surveillance on it.
Because delivery of packages to rural areas is terribly unprofitable.
Certain things need to be socialized in order to keep a country connected and enable development.
Without things like the post office, rural electrification, and the Eisenhower Interstate system, vast swatches of the US would have zero economic output.
Context is important.
It does? But yes, these things are glossed over quite a bit, which is also odd since there are enough wizards that grew up as muggles and should have a fairly good idea about what technology can do, and would miss tech they'd have to leave behind ((EDIT: in a modern version) no smartphones, no internet would be quite a jump for kids used to them)
Any suggestions for fantasy that does it better? I can think of Charlie Stross' The Laundry Files (where technology is actively used to harness the power of the paranormal), the Harry Dresden series and the Night Watch series (which shows older wizards struggling with technology, younger ones actively using it, and at one point an army of humans with magical artifacts posing quite a challenge)
As for story suggestions - well, I don't read a lot of fantasy, but the "fanfiction" Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (by LessWrong's Eliezer Yudkowsky) is a deeply amusing take on what havoc might have been wreaked in the Harry Potter universe by someone who, finding themselves in it, applies the scientific method. (If that's not enough to pique your interest, at one point in the story Harry explores the possibility of using a time-turner to deterministically solve NP-hard problems through the forced creation of stable time loops.)
Another good story is Sam Hughes' "Ra", where magic is literally a field of scientific research and engineering. It scratches the same itch as Methods of Rationality (scientific deconstruction of magic), but in a universe built for that purpose. It's awesome.
In the Dresden Files books, it's a sliding scale and the titular Harry Dresden drives an old VW Beetle because it's primitive enough to still (mostly) function in the presence of magic.
[0]: https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/technology
See also: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/ and http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.com/2013_08_11_archive...
edit: maybe you just mean that it contains gratuitous references to rape? I guess that's a fair opinion to hold, but I think it's clear that the Draco thing wasn't included for the fun of it, but was intended to show how messed up his upbringing/society was in a way that would genuinely shock the reader. And I can't remember exactly what happened to Bellatrix, but I also don't remember getting the sense that the book was revelling in the grisly details or anything like that.
“Hey, Draco, you know what I bet is even better for becoming friends than exchanging secrets? Committing murder.” “I have a tutor who says that,” Draco allowed. He reached inside his robes and scratched himself with an easy, natural motion. “Who’ve you got in mind?” Harry slammed The Quibbler down hard on the picnic table. “The guy who came up with this headline.” Draco groaned. “Not a guy. A girl. A ten-year-old girl, can you believe it? She went nuts after her mother died and her father, who owns this newspaper, is convinced that she’s a seer, so when he doesn’t know he asks Luna Lovegood and believes anything she says.” … Draco snarled. “She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her.”
Also it's been many many years since I've read the books, but I don't remember a whole lot of killing on the parts of the heroes; a quick check of the Harry Potter wiki confirms that Neville killed Scabior, Molly Weasley killed Bellatrix, and various monsters bit it; I'm also going to choose not to count the obvious other example on grounds of intent.