Put on the science glasses, it's Research time!

So, I will be typing up this post as I find sources, to keep things fresh in my mind. I've decided to start with my second chapter, as it is the one that I am currently spending the most time working on.

"It's Us. Only Us": The Movement of Reading from a Solitary Hobby to a Social Activity

So, for this chapter I'm using the changes made to the traditional comic book formula in the graphic novel Watchmen to highlight some of our changes in the way that reading is becoming a more and more social activity.

For my Social Graph, I will be talking with two people who I know through social networks. The first is a personal friend named Johnathan Grover. He is a major comic book nerd, has attended and even worked at Comic Cons in the past, and has pretty big opinions on such matters. The second is a user on Imgur who goes by the username Deadpoolsupplier. Spending more than a few minutes looking at his comments should indicate why I find him to be a good source.

For the New Media section, I have found a treasure trove in a single video: Watchmen - The Phenomenon: The Comic That Changed Comics 30 minutes of discussion about what Watchmen is and how it changed comic books? Count me in.

For my social networks, I will be using two. The first will be the reviews section of Watchmen on Goodreads. The other is a forum discussing Watchmen over at Comic Vine.

As for my traditional sources, I will be focusing on one in particular that covers this issue very explicitly: Hughes, Jamie "Who Watches the Watchmen: Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes"

Unstuck in Time: An Analysis of the Nonlinear Consumption of Literature

For my Social Graph, I will be setting up a facebook group among my friends and discussing with them in a style similar to a facebook "focus group." I have no made the group yet due to time constraints, but I think it will be an interesting way of gathering opinions. 

For my New Media, I will be using something interesting, but which demonstrates my idea wonderfully. It is a video called Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut reads War backwards HD.

In the video, it has music playing and a voiceover reading the portion of the story when Billy Pilgrim becomes unstuck in time and watches a movie backwards, which changes the entire meaning of the movie. 

I had a hard time finding discussion forums for Slaughterhouse Five outside of Goodreads, so I will use a somewhat combined source between Social Networks and New Media by way of a podcast that features a book club having a discussion about Slaughterhouse Five that was put on by Slate Audiobooks. 

For my Traditional source, I'll be working with an article titled Slaughterhouse Five: Time out of Joint by Arnold Edelstein. 

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. 

"And So it Goes"

The novel I will be writing about is "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut. It is important to me as a piece of literature for several reasons, not the least of which is that it was the first piece of school-assigned literature that I felt had a large emotional impact on me.

The book is, in a phrase, mildly disturbing. It speaks of the horrors of war in a way that is disjointed and separate from what is occurring, while also casting a clear lens upon those horrors. It is like watching the film of JFK's assassination. You witness a man's death, see the blood shoot from his head, and even see the panic afterwards. But as real and as horrifying as the image is, you are still so far away from it.

Slaughterhouse Five changed the way that I read books. I didn't read that book because I was enjoying the story. The story is disjointed and difficult to follow. The main character jumps around in time, creating a set of small, strange vignettes that surround a truly horrible war story. And yet, the emotions that it causes in the reader are real. The feeling of confusion and disorientation is purposeful and a mighty tool in Vonnegut's arsenal for telling this story. You feel exactly as certain of what is happening to this man, as he himself is.

And through all of this horror, the words of the strange aliens that have such a central place in the plot echo after every single tragic death: "So it goes." The deaths are violent and cruel, yet immediately dismissed in a way that makes you want to scream at the pages that they deserve some proper eulogy because they were people and no one deserves to die like that and be so handily dismissed. And in that moment, you recognize the sanctity of life. And you feel the weight of inevitability. And you feel the sadness of loss.

It is rare that pieces of "school" literature make me feel real emotions. This one, however, has haunted my thoughts for years since I first flipped through its pages.