What is Collective Discourse?

My research ideas have recently been mainly about how we can characterize and exploit collective discourse.
So what is collective discourse?

With the growth of Web 2.0, millions of individuals involve in collective discourse. They participate in  online discussions, share their opinions, and generate  content about the same artifacts, objects, and news  events in Web portals like amazon.com,  epinions.com, imdb.com and so forth. This massive  amount of text is mainly written on the Web by non-expert individuals with different perspectives, and yet  exhibits accurate knowledge as a whole.

In social media, collective discourse is often a  collective reaction to an event. A collective reaction  to a well-defined subject emerges in response to an event (a movie release, a breaking story, a newly  published paper) in the form of independent writings (movie reviews, news headlines, citation sentences)  by many individuals.

A common characteristic of collective discourse, just like many other collective behaviors,  is the diversity among individuals engaging in it. This diversity is emerges in form of diverse perspectives that different people have about the discussed topic.  

The diversity of perspectives in non-expert contributions  in collective discourse can be exploited to discover various aspects about a subject that are otherwise  hard to unveil.

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