ABOUT the research AS activists and journalists strove to source information and expose it to international attention, an enormous effort was expended on maintaining a flow of information into the country of the state security apparatus was pervasive. His units infiltrated almost every organization in the country, and maintained networks of spies in almost every neighborhood. These networks relied in turn on local informants who routinely passed along snippets of information under coercion or to gain favors or protection. Christina Fink’s aptly named “Living Silence: Life under Military Rule in Burma” describes a society infected with fear and mistrust that divided even close knit communities, family and friends. Information was both a precious and dangerous commodity, closely linked to notions of risk and power, traded through formal and informal channels invested with a range of trust and attitude factors by different parts of the population. “Living Silence” describes an unusually highly charged and multi-faceted information ecosystem. Alternative Information Supply as a Pro Democracy Tactic At the same time that activists and journalists strove to source information from inside the secretive state and expose it to the radar of international attention, an enormous amount of effort was expended on trying to maintain a flow of news and information into the country. This came from the US, UK, Scandinavia, Thailand, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and a multitude of actors including the exiled wing of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party, exiled ethnic leadership, international donor governments, civil society organizations, human rights and media development organizations. All these groups weighed in with the intention not only of moderating the impact of propaganda with independent information, but also to encourage and support pro-democracy elements inside the country. The tactic of introducing supplies of alternative information (or even outright counter-propaganda) to the information ecosystems of closed or contested territories is as old as the strategy of propaganda itself. From 1940 onwards, the BBC World Service in Burmese was a key source of news and information on shortwave radio for citizens of Burma, a role that peaked in political significance during the student uprisings of 1988. During this time citizens in far-flung parts of Burma were made aware that radical dissatisfaction was being openly expressed in the capital. In the years that followed, the BBC Burmese service was joined on shortwave by the Voice of America (VOA) Burmese service and the official “voice of the pro-democracy movement” the Democratic Voice (DVB) of Burma out of Oslo. In Thailand a plethora of small activist publications sprang up, some of them products of the information offices of the ethnic armies, many of them intermittently published and of poor quality, but all aiming (or claiming) to reach people inside Burma. The logistics of doing this were daunting, as the publications had to be hand smuggled across the border, where carriers and readers alike could receive a mandatory seven year sentence for possession of this kind of literature. There was no paying market for these publications so they relied on international grant funding and training supplied by Internews, the Open Society Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy and others. Through the late 90s and through the 2000s, thousands of small newspapers in Burmese and ethnic languages were produced and moved through covert networks across the border. This supply effort was considered an important aspect of the pro-democracy struggle, based largely on prodemocratic assumptions about demand, access and reach inside the country. It presumed that many people in Burma distrusted state media and hungered for independent news and information about political developments (or lack of them) in the country. It was next to impossible to conduct any systematic audience surveys in the country, so evidence of the extent to which citizens accessed both shortwave radio signals and publications was anecdotal and patchy, gleaned from the distribution networks themselves, and from refugees and exiles arriving at the border. The success of the supply effort had to be estimated primarily as a quantitative function of production+distribution. Broadcast footprints plus numbers of publications coming off the presses were summed up to estimate the extent to which people became better informed about what was going on in their own country. What was (and still is) less well understood is the extent to which these efforts actually reached their intended audiences and whether the information was useful to those audiences (i.e. did it meet their information needs and help them to make decisions relevant to their lives?). New Perspectives: Supply vs Consumption As time went on and the sophistication of the nascent Burma media community in exile grew, questions arose around factors that might influence the spread of the information contained in the media disseminated, including literacy levels, ability of ethnic people to read Burmese language, the likelihood that publications would be passed from hand to hand, and the expectation that those who read the publications 14 INFORMATION ECOSYSTEMS in transition: a case study from myanmar part one: rese arch findings would share their content by word of mouth. In absence of the ability to conduct conventional audience research, the effort to provide people in Burma with independent information started to gear itself around more nuanced notions about the information ecosystems that lay on the other side of the border. It was recognized, for instance, that in each ethnic state, and even in different parts of each ethnic state, the information arriving in communities through radio and newspapers would reach and spread amongst citizens in uneven ways that would change over time, depending on external factors (i.e. balance of power between the military and the ethnic armies, security, transport, access to electricity and radio sets, and even the personalities of key community figures or military commanders who might facilitate or obstruct information flows). The relevance of this background to those seeking to understand and work with the concept of information ecosystems is the way in which environments such as Burma (closed states, restricted environments, media dark areas, conflict zones etc.) challenge us to think about information dynamics beyond typical assumptions about (or measurements of) media supply and media consumption. It further challenges us to consider the fact that the media is frequently not a primary source of information for the majority of citizens in these kinds of complex closed environments, and what the implications of that may be for reaching people with information that can improve their lives. In low tech and low literacy environments, the primary mode of information exchange (flow) is likely to be word of mouth from family, friends, community leaders and others, a mechanism intrinsically related to circles of trust and subject to a multitude of influences and perceptions shaped by other community dynamics. One example of this is the extent to which the Burmese army itself became a significant source of information for the ethnic communities that it oppressed, not only 15 how to inform, empower, and impact communities INFORMATION ECOSYSTEMS in transition: a case study from myanmar how to inform, empower, and impact communities PART ONE: RESEARCH FINDINGS