Perhaps the most basic way to think about institutions is that they are concentrations of certain kinds of expertise, within stable incentive structures. Democratizing communications through digital technology normalizes both incentives and membership, by permitting participation on the basis of any sort of incentive, by anyone with any kind of expertise. As the Cluetrain Manifesto says, “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”.
Merely clearing a space for participation isn’t necessarily enough to produce more constructive collaboration however, since people communicate with different specialized vocabularies and with different goals, and since online communities often suffer from the ’spiral of silence’, whereby under-represented minority views express themselves less.
This leads me to think that deliberative processes designed in online spaces should take into account the excesses and deficiencies that existing institutions suffer from, and alleviate them by introducing new areas of expertise, and new incentive structures.
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