A result from this mission is that Facebook offers a broad specter of functions, everything
from games, stores, news and of course, connectivity. In Yangon, Facebook function as an
obligatory passage point (Law & Callon, 1988) for the user to access the rest of “the
internet.” Another potential reason for Facebook´s popularity is the pricing of sim-card and
Wi-Fi-connection. Since internet-access through 3G is the cheap and stable option, most
people have access through a smartphone rather than a computer. This again affects the way
the internet is accessed, primarily since this smartphone very often is sold with Facebook preinstalled. If not, Facebook is one of the first things your seller will install in the store; it is also
one of the first platforms one meets going online. It is almost as when all roads lead to Rome,
all links on the internet lead to Facebook. Facebook has become ubiquitous to the extent that
it is often mistaken as the entirety of the internet.
Internet was a strange and hard thing to wrap one’s head around in Myanmar before 2014,
and it still is in many ways. It is still a very abstract concept, not only in Myanmar. We use
the internet every day, but most would not be able to explain in detail how the internet
functions. In Myanmar, they have an extra obstacle. Before 2014, only the people with a good
income, the right contacts and/or a particular interest in the technology had internet access.
This means that most people had their very first meeting with the internet not that long ago.
Aside from this, even a “normal” smartphone or cellphone was hard to access, caused by the
extreme pricing of the sim-cards set by the government. My friend Win explained to me how
he had never seen a smartphone in real life until recent years, only in commercials. This is
also reflected through the opening story with Dedan and how he told me about his first
meeting with the internet, and how strange it all seemed at the time.
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