Chapter 5. “On Facebook is The Real Feelings” When you have a smartphone in your pocket, you are always available, even when physically far away. Even though the concept of a smartphone is still quite fresh in Yangon, the tethering plays out in Yangon with huge similarities to the western world. My local friends were always on, they always had the phone with them, and they always answered within a short period. Walking around in the city, I would see smartphones in the back of a longyi - next to the wallet, or inside the knot in front of a male longyi, in people´s pockets and purses, watching the local rickshaw-driver relaxing in the passenger seat enjoying videos without headphones, or the taxi driver with the smartphone safely in a phone mount. I once asked Dedan, while he wrote to his friends to meet us for some beers, how they planned these meetings before smartphones. Dedan then stopped writing, thinking long and hard and looked at me with a frustrated expression. He realized he did not remember at the moment, “I guess we planned ahead from each time we met up?”. At this point, it was only four years since they got access to smartphones, and already the people in Yangon is as entangled with the phone as, one can argue, the rest of the online world is, struggling to remember how things were done earlier without thinking hard about it. In this chapter, I will explore online expressed feelings and emotions, and how they can play an essential role in the life of younger people. To be able to fruitfully discuss the affect, the emotions, and the feelings, I draw on Brian Massumi which writes of the autonomy of affect as of forces that flows through the body to materialize as emotion. He writes: “An emotion or feeling is a recognized affect, an identified intensity as re-injected into stimulus-response paths, into action-reactions circuits of infolding and externalization: in short, into subject-object relations. Emotion is a contamination of empirical space by affect, which belongs to the body without an image” (Welchman & Biennale of, 1996, p. 33) My interpretation and a distinction with this understanding are as follow; Affect is something hard to grasp, one does not always know of it and what it is, but the affect from something can still be present. Emotion is something one feels and is aware off; emotion is conscious and can as, therefore, be felt. A feeling, however, is something expressed. It can be an expressed emotion or meaning, but it occurs in the form of intended action or non-action. Further, I aim to explore the idea that emotion can function as a tool used to navigate “the internet” as a potential emotional compass. How can affect, emotion, and feelings combined with technology and social media in Yangon today be understood? 64