Peter Vajda has written Robert Fuller to point out that several bloggers in the professional world have recently taken up the subject of negativity, and he has written his own essay on how this negativity is manifested in the blogosphere.

I’m curious as to whether there’s a widespread belief that the blogosphere is inherently negative since I personally have never had that impression. Therefore, I’m posting the Vajda essay here, and I invite everyone who reads this blog or otherwise deals with meta-analysis on the blogosphere to offer their views on whether there is a preponderance of negativity.

Here’s the first paragraph of the Vajda essay to give everyone a taste of the argument:

Social scientists, socioeconomists, and social psychologists are increasingly pointing to the fact that the social mood in the United States, and across the world’s culture and civilization is turning bad and that overall social mood is going to get a lot worse before improving. Research graphs and diagrams, such as the Elliot Wave Principle, underscore the finding that there is a natural ebb and flow of social mood (positive vs. negative) and that darker times, socially and politically, lie ahead of us, creating increased tension and negativity. Nowhere is this negative mood more evident than in the blogosphere where incivility, disrespect, meanness, bullying, and demeaning behavior rule the day, and the posts. What is it that accounts for this negativity among bloggers and what can be done to perhaps soothe and diminish their high degree of vitriol, rancor, meanness, incivility and disrespect?

Read the rest of the Vajda essay here.

Check out the pictures from Robert Fuller’s tour of Australia and New Zealand! I like the little spiky echidna.

The right to die with dignity is widely accepted. Can the right to live with dignity be far behind?

If anyone who reads this blog lives in the Berkeley area, Robert Fuller will be speaking about his book All Rise at Black Oak Books tonight (Wednesday, 9/6) at 7:30pm.

Location: 1491 Shattuck Avenue (at Vine St., near Walnut Square), Berkeley, CA 94709. Here’s a Yahoo map, and here’s an online trip planner for public transportation.

Robert Fuller will be interviewed by Michael Krasny on KQED forum Tuesday (tomorrow) from 10 to 11am. The interview may be run again from 10 to 11pm.

Update: Michael Krasny has posted a podcast of Fuller’s interview here.

Fuller just called me from Seattle, and he had a fantastic time there! Go, dignity movement! One of his radio interviews can be found on the KUOW web site here.

Fuller is now on his way to Denver to speak at the Boulder Book Store on Thursday at 7:30pm and The Tattered Cover on Friday at 5:30pm.

Robert Fuller’s 6/26/06 Washington Journal (C-Span) interview on the Politics of Dignity can be found here.

(To view the video, you need RealPlayer on your computer.)

Fuller appeared on Washinton Journal this morning. He talked a bit about forming a larger political consensus, and the questions were extremely varied. Most of the callers seemed to be from the older part of the population, and I was impressed by their grasp of political issues. I tend to assume the “netroots” are more informed because of ease of access to information on the Internet, but I may be underestimating how much people still learn from newspapers and radio.

The most interesting thing was several of these callers, who had a very long view on American history, thought that the country was more divided today than it ever has been

Robert Fuller is back in Berkeley, bearing pictures from YearlyKos. Here’s a summary of his thoughts on the gathering:

YearlyKos was not exactly a passing of the torch from traditional to Internet journalists-there remains a need for books, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV-but it was certainly the acknowledgement by the former of the latter as co-equal members of the indispensable Fourth Estate. If a democracy needs a free and vigilant press to hold government accountable, then the traditional media that historically played that role need the new Internet journalists to hold it accountable. The Romans used to ask “Who guards the guardians?” The analogous questions for media are “Who watches the watchers?”, “Who chronicles the chroniclers?”

The emergent Blogosphere provides an answer. A swarm of bloggers can force the media to live up to the standards of integrity taught in journalism schools or depicted in movies like Good Night and Good Luck. At YearlyKos, 1000 bloggers assembled for the first time and a few famous traditional journalists wrote about the phenomenon with a mixture of condescension and respect. It’s hard to imagine democracy making the evolutionary step to a dignitarian society,
without this new breed of watchdogs that has found a home in the Blogosphere.

While at YearlyKos, Fuller hung out with the Link TV crew as they video-blogged the event.

Robert Fuller just called to update me on all the goings-on at YearlyKos. He attended the Political Journalism panel, where representatives of the main stream media incuding Atrios, Matt Bai, Jay Rosen, Christy Hardin Smith, and Paul Waldman engaged with the increasing influence of bloggers in the national conversation. Fuller was particularly impressed with blogger Marcy Wheeler (”emptywheel” on Daily Kos and The Next Hurrah).

Fuller also spoke highly of the New Politics Begins panel, led by New Democratic Network President Simon Rosenberg and New Politics Institute Director Peter Leyden. This panel examined specific social and political factors (such as immigration) that the Democrats would have to take into account in order to win the presidency in 2008.

Fuller also met Dr. Joel Rogers (Professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of Center On Wisconsin Strategy) at a panel on Labor and Power.