Matt Schissler The approach taken in this paper is loosely based upon a similar, but far more ambitious, 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 asking, first, how ideas and information had been communicated in the past.31 “The cheap mobile phone is the most disruptive device to hit humanity since shoes,”32 they note in the introduction to their research, published in 2013 as The Great Indian Phonebook. Jeffery and Doron illustrate this claim with a hypothetical, in which a boatman on the River Ganga dials his phone to lodge a complaint with the chief of a major company. “The scene is our fantasy. It has never happened; but it could,” they note. “For the first time, even the poorest, lowest-status people in India can connect to the wealthiest and most highly placed.”33 Their fantasy is apropos, because something remarkably similar has been playing out in Myanmar over the last two months. On January 28th, Minister of Livestock, Fisheries and Rural Development U Ohn Myint travelled to inspect a village in central Myanmar’s Magway Region. His subsequent interaction with residents, who had come to complain about lack of clean water, has become a national issue. “I can go around and slap everyone's faces,” he told the assembled group. “If anyone insults or opposes the government, [I will] hit them and lock them up.” What is different now, however, is that U Ohn Myint’s statements were captured on video. Shared on Facebook, the video spread like wildfire and was soon taken up by Myanmar's recently liberalized print media. Within a few days, a small protest had been staged in faraway Yangon and the issue had been mooted at parliament in the capital. Two weeks later, it continued to be a controversy. On February 10th, more than 1,000 local residents in Magway staged a demonstration calling for the Minister’s dismissal.34 This is the quintessential example of a repressive authority figure being called to account in a way made uniquely possible by new technology, an example of the surveillance-from-below ‘sous-veillance’ popularized by Steve Mann.35 New communication technologies – mobile phones, the Internet, social media – have opened the way for such processes, enabling people to generate, share, and disseminate new information and ideas to a sometimes global audience. These technologies have been credited with the creation of relatively open spheres for deliberation in the face of strong restrictions in places such as China36 and even the mobilization of successful democratic movements such as during the Arab Spring.37 At its most breathless, however, such rhetoric also smacks of the latest incarnation of utopianism that seems to accompany each generation of new technology, and it is important to note that new technologies may also strengthen authority and control.38 For the same reasons that these technologies may be powerful tools for political mobilization, they are no less powerful when similarly harnessed by states and 31 Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, The Great Indian Phone Book: How Cheap Mobile Phones Change Business, Politics and Daily Life (London: Hurst & Company, 2013), 19. 32 Ibid., 2. 33 Ibid., 1. 34 Nyein Nyein, “Marching Villagers Call for Burma Minister to Be Sacked Over Comments,” The Irrawaddy, February 11, 2014, http://www.irrawaddy.org/burma/marching-villagers-call-burma-minister-sackedcomments.html. 35 Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments.,” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 331–55. 36 Orion A. Lewis, “Net Inclusion: New Media’s Impact on Deliberative Politics in China,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 43, no. 4 (2013): 678–708, doi:10.1080/00472336.2013.769387. 37 Philip N Howard and Muzammil M Hussain, Digital Media and the Arab Spring (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 38 Morozov for examples calls the latest “cyber utopianism.” Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion the Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011). 8/13