Doing homework online is a difficult task… Distractions are endless when you’re looking at a blog, and every other sentence is in purple type, screaming, CLICK ME I’M A LINK!!! I am not a regular blogger… or at least, I haven’t been in the past. I guess we’re all getting into our own blogs now, but I have no specific blog that I follow on a regular basis. Today I decided to scope out the world of music in blog form and found myself at the Yahoo Music blogs, reading about a tearful and shameful John Mayer. “John Mayer Breaks Down in Tears After Public Apology,” to be exact. This post talks about John Mayer’s in-concert apology, for the things he said in a Playboy interview about his love life. Now feeling the aftermath of his words from angry and disappointed fans, he stood on stage claiming, “I quit the media game. I’m out. I’m done. I just want to play my guitar.” Looking past the content of this blog, it’s told in a variety of different languages. The on-line environment for distributing information has become one language, a melting pot of many other technological languages. I might say that I “read” this music blog, but really I read it, watched it, clicked it, scrolled it, and listened to it. The story is probably tenth generation by now, quoting sentences from other articles from online blogs or paper magazines, inserting Mayer’s tweets from Twitter, and publishing the average Joe’s YouTube video from the seventeenth row at the concert. (At E! online, you can watch it from the balcony, too). In the past fifteen minutes I’ve been shocked by John Mayer, sympathized with him, been totally disturbed by him, Tweeted him, and been confused as to how different his speaking voice is from his singing voice.

All of these different emotions are brought about by the various types of electronic languages incorporated in the grammar of this blog. I didn’t know anything about the Playboy debacle or his public apology, until I read the Yahoo Blog. Therefore my first reaction was in response to the YouTube video of his apology…. Seemed nice enough. This subconsciously made me read the interview differently, in a more empathetic state of mind. Then you get not just the interview, but editor’s opinions interspersed between Mayer’s quotes. We’re like a block of fresh playdough being mashed every time we open a new tab on Safari – the different media shaping us to respond differently to each page containing the same content, spoken in a new language, looked at from a new angle.

A blog like this gets all your senses involves and makes you see the event from every aspect. We don’t just read about what John Mayer said, but we see him on stage and listen to him speaking. We then are taken to his Twitter page in one click, so that we can see him continuing to apologize. Here we read his apology in chunks – Not one fluid paragraph like we see in magazines, but in snippets of 140 characters each, showing up upside-down. Or backwards? Stacked. Above and below these snippets are the reactions of fans, supportive and disappointed. This of course brings me to a whole new discovery – that I’m sitting in bed on a Monday afternoon doing my homework, and all of a sudden I’ve been led to believe that I can chat with John Mayer. So I tweet him in response to a country song he likes… totally disregarding all comments about the media debacle.

I’ve gone from homework, to YouTube, to itunes, to Playboy, to Twitter, to country music, to blogging. It’s a never-ending cycle. Maybe I’ve just now been sucked in and won’t be able to climb out of the world of blogging and the many languages of technology.