Quarantine Diary Day 3: Meeting Shugatiti (1)

I met a young lady known by those who know and FOLLOW her as Shugatiti. Her eyelids, as she flutters them, are meant to pierce your soul and take you captive. A Delilah to your Samson. Let me hasten to add that I have not met her in the flesh but on the Delay show, a social media television “station” I had never watched before.

It is fair to say that I have never watched so much Ghana TV or video content for a long time. Of course, one watches the likes of Joy News, Citi News and other mainstream content on TV 3 and the like. Now under quarantine in London, and with a lot of time on my hands, I am now catching up on an aspect of Ghana I did not know existed. One can say that nothing has divided Ghanaians more emphatically than the great media divide. I am referring to what appears to be clear media-consuming categories within the country.

Read also: Quarantine Diary: Day Two

   Nana Kwasi Gyan Apenteng writes: Quarantine Diary – Day One

Many years ago, when the entire media of Ghana consisted of one TV station, two main radio stations and a sprinkling of newspapers mainly owned by the state, we were all literally on the same wavelength. People had their different programme preferences but essentially we watched, read and listened to the same programmes. The result of this was that we were preached the same values, more or less, and had the same heroes, especially in sports, culture and politics. Of course, we had the same villains too.

This is not to suggest that there was unanimity of opinions and an undifferentiated lifestyle. People were and always will be individuals but the media gave us the same things so to the extent that we all depended on the media for information, you could say we ate from the same bowl. The implication of that kind of situation for policy makers is clear. Policies in all areas of life could be based on some common assumptions since the media is usually a reliable avenue for gauging what people knew or wanted. Now, with hundreds of content outlets airing at the same time it would be difficult for anyone outside the realms of the Omnipresent to catch all of them. My thinking is that policy makers are probably concentrating on the more “mainstream” channels while ignoring the “popular” ones.

These popular channels, usually unregulated or even unknown to regulators are “followed” by millions of citizens and for some of them, this is their only “mainstream”. The Delay Show appears to be a particularly popular one and her content gets circulated among millions of social media handles within a short period of time, thus creating a trend. Tomorrow, I will watch more Shugatiti and tell you why she and her followers should not be ignored.

Quarantine is not supposed to be fun; no kind of imprisonment is fun, but the British weather continues to be my ally, and there are hundreds of hours of Ghana TV to watch.

Still, we shall overcome