Cumulative Deliberation: New Normativity in Studying Public Spheres Online

Section: New Media

The growing complexity of public spheres, especially because of their hybridization (Chadwick, 2013) and prosumerization (Toffler, 1980/2022) has led to a reassessment of the quality of public discussions and, on a broader scale, the quality of the public sphere in different countries. An important aspect of this reassessment is the normative orientation of discussions. In particular, the growth of complexity shifts their normative focus from consensus as in the classical theory of deliberation (Habermas, 2006) to dissonance (Pfetsch, 2018). The theory of public deliberation imposes high normative requirements on the participants of political discussions, while user communication does not meet such expectations, since their speech may be meaningless, biased and/or emotional. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that the formation of opinions on the Internet is cumulative, not deliberative. Thus, the author of this paper proposes to expand the existing views on the normativity of public discussions. First, the concept of cumulative deliberation is introduced in the paper, which allows the author to explain more precisely how opinions are formed in online discussions. Second, a new approach to normativity in user communication with the cumulative formation of opinions is proposed. This approach provides for distinguishing legitimate discursive practices that designate user discontent from deliberate digital threats, such as induced opinion formation, computational propaganda or cyberbullying.

DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2023.87122

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To cite this article: Bodrunova S.S. (2023) Kumulyativnaya deliberatsiya: novaya normativnost' v izuchenii publichnykh sfer onlayn [Cumulative Deliberation: New Normativity in Studying Public Spheres Online]. Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta. Seriya 10. Zhurnalistika 1: 87–122. DOI: DOI: 10.30547/vestnik.journ.1.2023.87122