violence in Meiktila, for example, a friend had emailed me a Facebook link to a grainy video of men with automatic weapons and faces masked by scarves, accompanied by a Burmese-language audio track threatening revenge for violence against Muslims. ‘The Muslims are going to be really angry now,’ he had said as he called to make sure I had seen the video. ‘I just want to let you know to please be careful’. The video was clearly a fake, and in a Facebook post a few days later I wondered why it had been taken seriously in spite of its conspicuous dubbing and low quality (Schissler 2013a). At other times, I have had real-life debates about the likely veracity of such videos, often with neighbourhood friends that share my scepticism but nonetheless feel compelled by the emotional pull of the footage. In May 2013 a video was making the rounds, purporting to be of a Buddhist beheaded by Muslim extremists in southern Thailand. ‘I don’t know if the person in the video is really Buddhist or not. But I saw it and when I see things like that, I feel it,’ a neighbourhood friend told me as we had discussed the video on the corner one afternoon, motioning a punch as he spoke. Later, after anti-Muslim riots in Lashio were said to have resulted from rumours of violence against a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man, we had agreed to be cautious about what to believe and not to spread misinformation. ‘If I don’t see it with my own eyes,’ he had said, ‘I won’t do anything’. A few minutes earlier, another of the friends sitting with us had been earnestly attesting to the reliability of a video showing a monk killed in Meiktila. ‘Do you want to watch it? I have it on my phone,’ he told me. ‘Everyone does’ (Schissler 2013b). It would be easy to explain the pull my friends identified in these videos as the product of low education levels or the nascent familiarity audiences in Myanmar have with parsing multimedia content. Surely, a population that has not had ready access to such media will find it particularly compelling. There is something additionally persuasive about information conveyed via multimedia – but this is true for all audiences, not just those in Myanmar. In my own political context in the US, for example, the moving pictures and inflammatory language of televised political attack ads help decide elections. Perhaps that is the point: Myanmar audiences will now be encountering those visual presentations of information and ideas that are powerful for audiences the world over. The above analysis indicates that new technologies will enable information and ideas to be shared and narratives developed across distances, at greater speeds, and with new credibility and persuasive power. These possibilities are inherent in new technologies, but to focus on them exclusively is to assume a kind of false consciousness for people in Myanmar in which BuddhistMuslim conflicts are primarily a function of ‘untrue’ information made newly available and accepted. This is, after all, the premise underlying the government’s decision to temporarily restrict access to Facebook after the Mandalay riots. But considering new technologies in light of the production of broad scripts of Muslim threat makes clear the radical insufficiency of focusing on individual little stories, because it is not their discrete presence or absence that completes or alters the script. On reflection, it is not likely that my friend felt compelled to email me and then follow up with a phone call because the grainy video he had shared was dispositive evidence of an imminent threat. It need not be; the virtual terrorist figures it presented were a synecdoche for a threat already established and located in Muslim bodies throughout Myanmar. That the faces of the figures were masked and bereft of any visual connection to the disembodied Burmese language dialogue dubbed over the video is a kind of confirmation that the particular fact of their bodies did not matter, only the threat that they signified. 13