The public sphere is (theoretically) supposed to be a rational and deliberative space where people who share a political community – a city, a region, a nation, … a world? – should come together and discuss issues of common nature. Numerous models of how this is done has been proposed, but what is the problem of non-deliberative public spheres? Do people not deliberate because they do not have to same or equal amounts of information, because they do not trust each other, because they are hostile towards each other, not playing fair? Is it because they only talk to people who agree with themselves or are of the same demographics? Is polarization – to take one example of what is normally perceived as an unhealthy opinion ecosystem – the effect of pure emotion, information deficits, attention deficits, or simply the nature of political conversation?

The problem has often been approached as the lack of information in terms of fixing the problem. But the problem, as the ecosystem map points to, is multifacetted, and many many more (cognition, information processing, psychology to name a few) may be added. Non-deliberative systems are so vast and many-layered that a one-fix design seem to be out of the question. The first step, however, is to map all the potential causes of the compound problem in order to grasp what to do in the first place.