The Cyber Dimension of Citizen Participation on Ghanaweb: an Analysis of Ghana's 2008 Presidential Campaign

While in its original form the public sphere is believed to manifest in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form public opinion, technological convergence has extended assembly to digital spheres for critical dialogue. This has led to the disruption in power hierarchies and a freer participation. Unknown is how this evolution has impacted on content encoding and decoding in online media like Ghanaweb. Using convenient sampling, virtual ethnography and questionnaires, this study examined the content of 82 (N=82) selected news items and features relating to two presidential candidates in Ghana's 2008 presidential election in the light of media theories. It extended Hall's polysemic interpretation of text in analyzing online text, and offered a fourth dimension to the reading of the text. The results indicate that while individual writers bring their own meanings and multiple influences to content production, news organizations are still immersed in their traditional structures.