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Key public officials were not available to be interviewed. In this thesis, only one key public official, governor of a state in Nigeria availed himself for an interview, and it was conducted via email. However, “special assistants” and other lower level public officials who were equally active users of digital media platforms

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were available for interview. It is important to note that there were times when there was no clear distinction in category and there was an overlap. For instance,

someone was interviewed under the citizen journalist category because she

worked on a citizens’ platform, however, she was equally a trained and certified

journalist. Under the category, religious leaders, the digital participant

observation exercise did not yield any prospective active digital media user to represent the Islamic religion. A pastor (who runs a Christian church) was interviewed in this category.

Information and communication technologies bring about cheap, fast and widespread communication, and communication in the form of deliberation and debate is an essential ingredient of any public sphere. Our theoretical understanding of the digital public sphere in Nigeria has been constructed through the past two chapters of conceptual research, but our empirical content (on the embryonic public sphere in Nigeria) will be informed by the interviewees, the supporting documents provided to the researcher while on field work, and relevant published literature on the Nigerian situation.

For Habermas and his subsequent interlocutors, the public sphere is a space of communication between civil society and the state, where rational-critical debate on substantive matters of public interest should emerge. The mass media was central to the functioning of this public sphere throughout the era of nation state development and consolidation. As noted in the previous chapter, my attempt to conceptualise a digital public sphere in the light of the critique of the classical

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model entails an attentiveness to structural change in five key components: 1. New media platforms/spaces

2. Communication techniques 3. Agents and agencies 4. Dialogue and issues 5. Impact and intervention

Being semi-structured interviews, these subjects were broached in a direct but not prescriptive way. Here below I will indicate the conceptual background that formed my various interview questions, based on these components.

New media platforms/spaces: As mentioned earlier, the printing press was central to the effectiveness of the bourgeois public sphere in Habermas’ study.

For Kellner however, the media in focus was television. In his book, Television

and the Crisis of Democracy (1990), it is his submission that the television and media in general have both failed in promoting an informed public discourse for democracy to thrive, as well as fuelled the growth of excessive corporate power.

In the digital public sphere, the new media spaces active in the public discourse here are blogs, social network sites, chat rooms, email groups and more. Where in Habermas’ construction of the public sphere, the printing press was central, in the digital public sphere, these new equally ‘abstract’ spaces play significant roles in fostering interaction and dialogue among citizens, including across borders. Although the quality of the conversations, the so-called deliberations, is up for debate, the potentialities of new digital communication tools for a democratic public sphere remains significant. New digital media platforms

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represent in contemporary times, the old coffee houses and salons where public deliberations took place in Habermas’ public sphere.

Communication Techniques: In the use of digital media communication technologies for public interaction, it is found that various techniques are employed in the ‘bringing together’ of the voices through specific forms of messaging, linguistic convention, protocols and forms of address. Voices interact online through ‘tweet-meets’, ‘twitter town hall meetings’, ‘comments on blog posts’, ‘hashtag culture’, ‘Facebook pages’, etc. This basically refers to the different ways people/users engage with one another in dialogue via digital media communication tools in the Nigerian digital public sphere.

Agents and Agencies: This refers to people and organisations that are active in the Nigerian digital public sphere. The digital public sphere is made up of people and organisations who use digital media tools in their interactions and as part of their deliberative processes to varying degrees, strategically or just tactically. Hence, their activities do bear influence on the nature of the public sphere in Nigeria – both socio-politically and culturally. A definition of the Nigeria digital public sphere would be incomplete without acknowledging who these groups are, what they do and how they contribute to the digital public sphere.

Dialogues and Issues: This element covers the intellectual or dialogic ‘content’ of the Nigerian digital public sphere. It answers the question: what are the people talking about? In Habermas’ public sphere, the issues under discussion were regarded as ‘public’ issues, formative of a co-extensive series of

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viewpoints known as ‘public opinion’. Hence, in interrogating the digital public sphere in Nigeria, the researcher needs to examine the nature of the topics in relation to the debate and any general formation of consensus (whether on group level or societal).

Impact and Interventions: just as there are agents and agencies made up of peoples and organisations, there are certain citizen-driven interventions and impacts that have come about in Nigeria as a result of the use of new digital media technologies. Indeed, a public sphere is grounded on the premise that its activities have a bearing on the state and its management of the country, region or city. These interventions are significant to the idea of the digital public sphere in Nigeria because they both validate and motivate participation, and in turn define the idea of ‘public good’.

These components, as stated in Section One, will define the structure and parameters of the narrative formed from the interview data. The interviews were not prescriptive, and the interviewees were broad and liberal in their responses and reference points.