government seemed to take a similar position, with the latter going so far as to shut down access to Facebook for two nights because it ‘could lead to a bigger conflict’.3 Locating the cause of riotous violence in a social media post can seem misplaced in a country where only a fraction of the population is estimated to have access to the Internet.4 Mobile phones and Internet access are widespread in Mandalay, but other recent instances of violence have been experienced at times in places in Myanmar where Internet access had not yet expanded. Since June 2012 large-scale violence has occurred in Rakhine State and central Myanmar, where 140,000 and 3,000 people remain displaced, respectively (UNOCHA 2014; Si Thu Lwin 2014). Smaller scale incidents involving the destruction of mosques, homes, and shops belonging to Muslims have also occurred in areas as diverse as Shan and Kachin states in northern Myanmar, the former capital of Yangon, and Bago Region and Kayin State to the east. New telecommunications infrastructure is under development, however, and will soon make mobile phone and Internet access available for the majority of Myanmar’s population, along with concomitant media and communication platforms. The pace of this growth is expected to be rapid, and while it is important to adopt a critical eye when appraising pronouncements of a future for Myanmar that is technologically determined,5 it is also important to consider the material effects of these technologies. Scholarship in the field of the history of technology is a persuasive reminder that it matters how technologies are able to accomplish particular purposes, both those they are designed for and those unforeseen, processes which interact with and help to constitute politics (Hecht 2001: 267). Thus the adage: ‘[t]echnology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’, and technology may reflect, strengthen, perform, and change existing power relationships (Allen and Hecht 2001: 1, 10). Significant changes to Myanmar’s technological and media environment are underway but still nascent; understanding their emergent interrelationship with Buddhist-Muslim violence is as much an anticipatory concern as it is yet an empirical one. Therefore, in an effort to open the way to further inquiry, this chapter will consider the potential alignments between newlyarriving technologies and those everyday communication practices developed as a part of surviving under, and sometimes contesting, decades of authoritarian rule in Myanmar. This approach is loosely based upon a similar project undertaken by the anthropologists Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, who explored the transformations wrought by rapid increases in mobile phone access in India by first asking how ideas and information had been communicated in the past. In doing so, Jeffrey and Doron were able to identify ways in which cheap mobile phones materially disrupted established practices; they then discuss the implications of these disruptions for gender 3 Disruptions were quickly noted after the second night of violence (Eleven Myanmar 2014b). Government authorities later confirmed that they were responsible for this disruption (The Irrawaddy Blog 2014). 4 Estimates on the exact percentage of the population that has access to the Internet vary. In a forum involving government, civil society and technology companies during July 2014, for example, government attendees estimated connectivity at less than 5 percent. Market research companies, meanwhile, have estimated the number as just 1 percent, while the Myanmar Computer Federation estimates 25 percent of the country is already online. Whatever the actual percentage is it is quite low, but changing rapidly. See for example, We Are Social 2014; The Star 2014. 5 Eric Schmidt, chairperson of Google, for example told a group assembled at the Yangon ICT Park in March 2013 that the country is set to ‘leapfrog 20 years of difficult-to-maintain infrastructure and go straight to the most modern… We have a chance to see how a new nation can shape itself, not just its own destiny, but also its relationships with neighbours, its economic growth and what I believe will be its extremely rapid social development.’ See Schmidt 2013. 2