Can blogging be used to express an institutional point of view? The University of Chicago's law department faculty aim to find out. They've started a group blog that purports to be merely an extension of that university and that department's tradition of "lively conversation". Anyway, you be the judge (and jury! and litigant!).
Of the recent posts, I was especially interested in Professor Cass Sunstein's description of "group polarization". This is a phenomenon in which " like-minded people, engaged in discussion with one another, tend to go to extremes". So if you've got a group of self-avowed liberals given the task to make a statement about a social or political issue, they are more likely to make a statement that is more on the extreme end of the liberal spectrum than they would if the group were comprised of liberals and conservatives. Or than individuals within the group would likely make on their own.
Interesting concept. Question is, will this group blog bear that idea out? Will the mostly democratically-leaning law faculty of U of C express individual voices or will they coalesce into a more extreme collage of attitudes? Or will this experiment prove that technology trumps groupthink? And that the Internet is the new frontier for the lone individual voice?
Regardless, their blog is definitely worth an RSS feed.
* This title is a quote from the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog entry about the Chicago law faculty blog.
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