At the same time, care should be taken not to over-centralise any one platform. Facebook may decline in popularity, as some have recently predicted (Cannarella and Spechler 2014), and other applications will grow in popularity. Facebook and Viber are two units of analysis salient in the present moment, but the concerns of this chapter will be relevant for other platforms were they popular instead, or when they become so. It is, ultimately, important to approach the concept of ‘technology’ without prefiguring those considered to be most important (for example, ‘social media’). The reality invariably will be one in which multiple technologies are interacting with one another and with the existing social and power relations that they are simultaneously helping to re-shape (Sterne 2003). Myanmar’s telecommunications infrastructure is growing and this will introduce mobile phones, Internet access, and a host of applications and media sources not previously encountered by most people in the country, along with other important changes such as expansion of roads and electrification that are a necessary to power and maintain a new grid. This will be happening at the same moment that Myanmar’s economy is opening up to globalisation and people will be making use of a host of other material objects and technologies not previously encountered widely. Established Practices This section will explore two long established communication practices in Myanmar – rumours and the maintenance of plausible deniability – and their potential to align or be disrupted by new technologies and media. These are two strategies that contribute to managing risks, constructing communities, and accessing and disseminating information. This is not to drape over these strategies an ascribed functionality or, on the other hand, assume wholly autonomous agency for those employing them. But these strategies cannot be reduced to mechanical reactions, thoughtless reflexes, or the product of ignorance and low levels of formal education, though Myanmar’s national education system is in disarray. Instead, this section will examine them as habitus, Bourdieu’s formulation for history turned into nature, those practices that are both spontaneous, in that they are the immediate product of individual choices, and non-spontaneous, in that they are always rooted in those past conditions and structures that guide social action (Bourdieu 1995). Habitus is a useful heuristic for considering communication practices in Myanmar because it emphasises that they are techniques of the body that both dictate, and may be altered by, uses of new technologies (Sterne 2003: 380). ‘The “book” from which children learn their vision of the world is read with the body,’ Bourdieu notes (Bourdieu 1995: 90), just as, in updated form, there is always a person whose fingers are tapping on a tablet or a keyboard (Sterne 2003: 381). The first potential alignment between existing practices and new communications technologies was reaffirmed for me in discussions following a presentation of some of the early thoughts that motivated this chapter, at a January 2014 conference hosted by the National University of Singapore (NUS). ‘Don’t you think you may be overplaying this whole Facebook thing? I would not expect it to become a form of vernacular media,’ a participant with a research focus on South Asia asked following my presentation. ‘In Pakistan, social media is the least popular method. It is mass SMS messaging that is used to share information’. As we continued this discussion over the lunch break, the Myanmar heads around the table shook vigorously. ‘Nobody will use mass SMS messaging in Myanmar,’ another participant, a Muslim woman who lives in Yangon, told our colleague. ‘People are afraid to receive such messages, because they 5