with decades of experience using rumour to manage life and maintain community in an environment of restricted information are perhaps more adept at gathering such collections and producing narratives than people accustomed to living with free media and without censorship. In the context of literature produced within this milieu, Jennifer Leehey has amply illustrated the skill required to both produce and interpret texts created in light of these constrictions (Leehey 2010). Broadly applied, James Scott’s concept of metis provides the vocabulary for identifying the practical skills and acquired intelligence inherent in such communication strategies (Scott 1998: 313). This last recognition is important, finally, because metis complicates the assumption underlying explanations like those given for the July riots in Mandalay, where it was said that an untrue rumour spread on Facebook and so incensed the city that a riot spontaneously burst forth. This is an assumption about society in Myanmar as credulous to the point of gullibility and thus ripe to be misled by rumours, spread with new technologies. There are certainly people in Myanmar who fit this description, as there are in any place, but identifying existing communication practices highlights that a more careful consideration of the uses of new technologies will be necessary. On the night of violence in Meiktila, for example, my friends and I stood on our corner discussing rumours of riots in other parts of Yangon. ‘Did you check on the Internet? I heard they are fighting in Mingalataungnyunt [eastern Yangon]. Is it true?’ a friend had asked me. As we discussed this rumour we considered what might be happening, sifting through the information we had available; hearsay, a media report, Facebook, and then, finally, a mobile phone call to the ostensibly afflicted location (Schissler 2013a). For me, the experience drove home what it is to function in an environment of limited and unreliable information. My friends handled it with the implicit skill, metis, that comes from regular practice. Developing Narratives of Muslim Threat To say that telecommunications infrastructure will bring new forms of media and they will become widely used in Myanmar is not controversial; it is already happening, as the high profile examples of government agencies, politicians and religious leaders using Facebook demonstrate. But these illustrate social media as an alternative publishing platform for those in positions of authority, both within the state and without. The above discussion of established communication practices is important because it highlights how these new technologies are likely to be used by millions of ordinary people in Myanmar, as they engage the everyday processes of exchanging pieces of information and assembling and reassembling these into intelligible pictures of the world. If people incorporate new technologies into their everyday processes of communication and information gathering what, if anything, will change? Jeffrey and Doron emphasise this as a matter of new possibilities: ‘The new tool accords the possibility of... sav[ing] money independently of a spendthrift husband, infect[ing] others with commitment to a cause, or communicat[ing] with a sweetheart without approval of the family.’ It was the cumulative effect of these changed dynamics that they found to have had deep reverberations across Indian society (Jeffrey and Doron 2013: 11, 14). When the goal is to understand the development of violence and Buddhist-Muslim antagonism, however, it will not be sufficient to search for the effects of new technologies, for this would presume their centrality. In his exploration of the relationship between growths in televised media and Hindu nationalism in India, Arvind Rajagopal highlights the importance of instead considering the interrelationship between possibilities attendant to new media technology 8