As a new faculty member, I have been encouraged to blog.
I think I see its merits. Blogs instantly publish the thoughts of their authors and make them available to anyone with a computer. Apart from the instant gratification involved, blogs provide the means to easily and quickly communicate with a vast array of persons known and unknown, near and far.
Although I do not regularly read them, nor have I ever contributed to one, I know that blogs matter. Increasingly people write a blog or read those of others. A friend of a friend has a blog followed by thousands. Another friend admitted to a blogging addiction. In the latest issue of the University of Toronto Law Journal, Brenda Cossman and David Schneiderman suggest that being a blogger is among the identities that can constitute the "complex self." A few years ago, I had never heard the word; today, I encounter blogs everywhere I turn (wikipedia tells me there are 71 million of them).
Yet I sometimes wonder if, in the midst of it all, we are talking more and saying less. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, I can't shake the feeling that there is no here here. Busily blogging, are we still reflecting on our ideas and listening to one another? Maybe I've just got the first-time blogger jitters.
Great idea!
We're working on a group law school blog, and would love it if you could post an entry on us to direct some traffic our way.
Better still if some of your students want to sign up as authors, we would welcome a perspective from Western Canada.
Posted by: Law School Blog | July 20, 2007 at 10:56 AM