Slaughterhouse Mind

The book I will be focusing on for our project is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I perhaps should have chosen something else, since I'm running into a few interesting problems with finding themes to share between the digital age and a book written about WWII. However, I think I may have broached a few options.

• The Tralfamadorians have a different way of perceiving time than humans do. They see all of time at once, and consider the future to be inevitable. They can also directly observe the past. I could liken this to the way that the digital age allows us to document our past unlike any previous era. Whatever we do, a permanent digital copy can be made and easily shared. Our opinions are suddenly widely visible to any who care to look, our habits are made known, and we are accountable for ourselves in a way humanity has never been. This gives us a great deal of resources for researching new topics, but also makes it much more difficult to find sources that are respectable or accurate. 
• The protagonist of the story experiences his own life out-of-order, and so it can be related to the ways that digital media can cause us to experience a story out-of-order. It is quite common for us to read a quote from a book, or see a single scene from the film adaptation of a book, long before we ever get around to reading it. In some cases, we can even find out the ending to a book long before we ever read it. Yet this doesn't hinder most of us from seeking out those books and enjoying them.
• Whenever a person dies in the book, their death is followed by the phrase "so it goes," which can serve to minimize the impact of the death, and creates a disconnect between the reader and the action. In some ways, digital reading platforms can create a disconnect between the reader and the book. It has been shown that students who read out of a physical book have greater reading comprehension than those reading from a digital source. It would be possible to delve deeper into this subtle disconnect and see if there are ways to close the gap. It could also discuss the wall of anonymity that is created by using a web-based platform. Our statements are subtly disconnected from ourselves, allowing us to say things that we would never say in person. We can be entirely different people on the internet, more kind or more callous. We can be like the unstuck Protagonist, or we could be like the time-seeing Tralfamadorians. Enveloped in ourselves and others, or callous and indifferent.