people want to make the change towards Unicode, they are forced to use Zawgyi to be able to
communicate properly.
Win turned out to be a good interlocutor for discussing everything from religion, food,
education, and everyday life. After my return to Oslo, we kept in contact, and one day, we
started to discuss these fonts. Win works offshore with foreign people (mostly Asian origin)
and often travels with work. He does see the need to make the change to Unicode. Win
described his frustration to me writing; “It´s like telling the taste of a poem to the people who
only know alphabets.” This quote captures the essence of a lot of the frustration amongst the
pro-Unicode group.
There is not only the convenience of communication that is reproducing Zawgyi. Larger
corporate companies also play a big part. In Myanmar, which is a developing country, most
people would not afford phones from exclusive companies that as Apple and the more
expensive Samsung models. People in Myanmar, as we know, did not have access to internet
and phones until 2014, but then the market growth accelerated. Naturally, phone companies
wished to gain shares of the market, and the result is that cheaper Asian phones are common
amongst local users today. Huawei, Oppo, Samsung, and other Asian-based companies are the
largest distributors in the country. One of the steps companies made to gain market-shares
was to deliver phones with Zawgyi pre-installed as default, sometimes offering Unicode as an
option (Liao, 2017). This is still the case today. Facebook is also supporting both Unicode and
Zawgyi, and as we already know, Facebook is often considered as “the internet.” In
supporting both, they do not force their users to choose between the fonts. Business-wise
Facebook would lose most of their users if they removed the Zawgyi-support. Thura
explained to me how Facebook would not stop supporting Zawgyi; “they don´t wanna do it
because they would lose all their accounts, like lose all their customers.” This means that at
some level, someone else chooses others, without them being part of the decision or even
aware of it. The default font is one example and pre-installed Facebook another. It is then
reasonable to suggest, as is common amongst STS-scholars, that technology, at some level,
always is political.
Two main points can be drawn, we know what made Zawgyi so popular, but how did
Facebook grow so big? New phones are commonly delivered with Facebook pre-installed, or
they install it in the shop before you leave. During my fieldwork, I bought two different
phones, one Oppo and one Huawei, both times they unwrapped the phone in the shop and
proceeded to install Facebook, Messenger, and Zapia if they were not already in the device.
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