Matt Schissler in southern Thailand. “I don’t know if the person in the video is really Buddhist or not. But I saw it and when I see things like that, I feel it,” a friend told me as we had discussed the video on the corner one afternoon, motioning a punch as he spoke.58 Later, after anti-Muslim riots in Lashio were sparked by rumors of violence against a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man, he and our other friends and I had agreed to be cautious about what to believe and not to spread misinformation. “If I don’t see it with my own eyes,” he had said, “I won’t do anything.” A few minutes earlier, another of the friends sitting with us had been earnestly attesting to the reliability of a video showing a monk being killed in Meiktila. “Do you want to watch it? I have it on my phone,” he told me. “Everyone does.”59 It would be easy to dismiss this as the product of low education levels or the nascent familiarity audiences in Myanmar have with parsing multi-media content. Surely, a population that has not had ready access to such media will find it particularly compelling. There is something additionally persuasive about information conveyed via multimedia – but this is true of all audiences, not just those in Myanmar. Sunstein and Pariser wrote in an American political context where the moving pictures and inflammatory language of political attack ads on television help decide elections. Yet social media may generate dangerous dynamics not just because it is a platform that can help manifestly unreliable information seem reliable. Indeed, the information shared on Facebook and other platforms may be individually accurate, yet deeply problematic in aggregate. If information is sourced from media platforms that are only as neutral in their selection of what to present as those doing the filtering, the resulting picture will be skewed. Epistemic dependence is understandable when one accepts that cigarettes cause cancer, but it becomes dangerous when it dominates one’s understanding of the world. Burmese Buddhist Facebook users may see videos of a monk being killed, and no corollary videos of subsequent violence against Muslims. They will feel no less the victim under threat than Muslim users inundated with similar information and imagery. It may also be that this analysis overplays the ascendant dominance of Facebook. The platform may decline in popularity, as some have recently predicted.60 It is not, however, Facebook per se that is the issue so much as it is the alignment between any new media technologies that facilitate or encourage individuals to source information within cocoons of like-minded people, and established communication methods in Myanmar that encourage people to turn to and trust such sources. Republic.com, after all, was published before Facebook came to prominence, and the concerns Sunstein raised will last beyond the life of any one platform. The implication is not only that ‘echo chambers’ might emerge in Myanmar, but also that the combination of these echo chambers and already established methods of communication may have significant potential to persuade individual minds and shape their assemblage as popular consciousness. Sunstein was writing about the United States; his arguments may have even stronger applicability in Myanmar. ----The above analysis results in a string of provisional statements that are sufficient to produce a strong initial hypothesis. Social media may encourage tendencies towards homophily. It may also encourage epistemic seclusion that reinforces existing views, makes them more extreme, or makes extreme views easier to logically adopt. These dynamics may be magnified in Myanmar, because of the country’s particular histories of authoritarianism and the correlative strategies required for survival and resistance. If this paper’s analysis is accurate, it would indicate that the expansion of Internet access in Myanmar, 58 Matt Schissler, “Conversations after Lashio,” New Mandala, June 3, 2013, asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2013/06/03/conversations-after-lashio/. 59 Ibid. 60 John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler, “Epidemiological Modeling of Online Social Network Dynamics,” arXiv:1401.4208 [physics], January 16, 2014, http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4208. 12/13