“We will find those who disappear if we look for them, and as the time passes by, we will forget those who passed away…”
- DuckyEgg posted in Toilet SWAT Police Forum, author’s translation (from Burmese).
And so begins a dialogue in Burmese cyberspace on the popular social networking site, Toilet Wall. The carnivalesque dialogue continues with descriptions of lepers competing for the hand of Princess Cigarette Lighter, the daughter of King Love. While the standard picture of media and internet use inside Burma is one of censorship and repression, it seems that social networking is providing an important outlet for freer expression.
For those unfamiliar with the term, online social networks are websites that allow users to create their own online identity, through a nickname, avatar and personal page, and then interact with other users through chat rooms, forums, comment boards and groups. The most common of these in the English medium Internet are Facebook and Myspace.
In one sense, Burmese online social networks are like meta-teashops. Users come together and gossip, discuss news, talk about everyday life, religion, love, art, community work and occasionally politics; sharing their opinions. While in an offline teashop in Yangon, customers have to fear when the conversation verges on topics sensitive to the state, in the online world Burmese Internet users can hide behind their made-up identities. The sites can verge on something like an anyeint (carnival) — where the world with all its rigid social norms are turned upside-down: discussion about bowel movements is encouraged, swearing becomes acceptable, and parody is a way of life. “No toilet paper but unity!”, a slogan on Toilet Wall, is but one example of the witty satire found online. It is a parody of the official slogans calling for unity. Absurdity is cool.
The wide-range of social networking sites and their sub-groups give insight into new social and cultural developments: graffiti art, underground hip-hop, sexual identities, hacking, metal music, migration. The socio-economic reality is never far away as users struggling to work or study in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore offer advice and support to others. Discussions about the many difficulties young Burmese struggle with in their lives easily leads into sensitive topics.
In cyberspace, Burmese gay and lesbian people are gaining visibility too. Offline homosexuality is still largely taboo and homophobia remains common in Burma. Online social networks can provide important space for gay and lesbian people to gather, talk, organise and counter popular perceptions in a relatively safe space. Planet has a forum for gay people to share their experience with the opening message announcing, “Why are you hiding your feeling to other people? You can talk anything you feel about…. Let talk and open your mind happily [sic]“. For gays and lesbians in Burma, online networking has also led to offline events — in the form of parties or gatherings, including one for the International Day Against Homophobia this year.
While sites like Toilet Wall are hosted on free platforms accessible around the world and based outside the country, Burmese companies in Yangon are also designing networks from scratch. Two of the biggest, Planet and Mysuboo, are part of Inforithm-Maze, a business owned by Thaung Su Nyein, the son of former foreign minister Win Aung. Both of these men are targeted by European Union sanctions. Inforithm-Maze is also a key IT firm for the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). They boast an extensive range of government contracts, from web design and hosting for the Ministry of Commerce to stock administration and budgetary systems for the Ministry of Defence. They are also in charge of designing and maintaining “PSRMS Press Scrutiny Management System” for the Ministry of Information, the government agency tasked with censorship. Presumably if an effective system for user-generated web censorship were to be developed, it would come from the very company that is profiting from the open space.
Rather than being a marginalised form of media, online social networking technology is therefore firmly in the sphere of economic and state power. Co-option rather than government repression appears to be the trend.
According to one Yangon-based editor, the government does not yet have the technological skills to censor social networking sites, despite possessing what the OpenNet Initiative has described as “pervasive filtering”. Their only option at present appears to be the outright banning of sites, which is common with exiled media and political blogs. Some sites which maintain a legal presence in the country display rules warning against postings that could be considered “illegal”. Self-censorship exists online, but importantly there is space for debate about how far to push the boundaries. In response to one highly political posting in a Yangon-based web forum, one member responded, writing “If you want to post this – there are other sites where you can do that. This is an important public space so we shouldn’t risk losing this site!”
The dialogue taking place through social networking sites is important for building solidarity, community, awareness and consciousness among users. It can provide an outlet for freer and creative expression, compared to the tight control Burma’s government has on traditional media forms. Online social networking should be recognised as a key part of Burma’s new mediascape.
9 responses so far ↓
1 Reader // May 21, 2009 at 4:53 am
I think you should moderate a little your enthusiasm. In the case of Burma all these forms of communication are just in an embryonal stage, continuously hampered and, above all, the number of web users is one of the lowest all over the world. So, please, warning for the readers: put these remarks in the right context. It’s better to talk about reality than science fiction.
Regards.
2 Dylan Grey // May 21, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I completely disagree with the comments written by “Reader”. I think it’s shameful the way that certain aspects of life in Myanmar are presented to the outside world. Oftentimes, reports are politicized in order to be used as a tool; this can happen for either pro-democracy activists or the so-called regime ‘apologists’.
I think it is disheartening that reports on the realities of life in Myanmar are presented for politicization, but the people who get the sharp end of the stick are Myanmar nationals themselves. Everytime a report on internet censorship doesn’t discuss the burgeoning new media culture in Myanmar, the agency of those who are using these fora as a way to retaliate against political and societal norms is being taken away.
I was very impressed by this article by Violet Cho and Dave Gilbert, and happy to see a discussion of the internet in Myanmar. Yeah – it’s censored as all hell. But if you take a walk in downtown Yangon, or go up to more working-class neighbourhoods like Hlaing township, or Okkalapa, or Mayangone, you can see many locals popping into the internet shop to engage with the world wide web. Complaints are mostly about the terribly slow speeds and 300 Kyat/hour fee (US$0.30), rather than the censorship. Most internet cafes have staff who will aide in using computer programs designed to get around the government censors, in order to access any website. While the shop owners certainly risk flouting Myanmar’s censorship and digital content laws, these subtle forms of resiliency do indeed give people agency. I am glad to see this represented in this article.
As an aside, this misrepresentation goes well beyond issues of internet censorship. For example, during this week of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s show trial, it has been fascinating watching BBC and CNN to see how their reporters react. BBC is currently airing a clip where the reporter claims, to paraphrase, “that locals are terrified to voice their opinions for fear of being arrested on the spot within 5 minutes.”
Hello? Are you kidding me? Hop into a cab and talk to any taxi driver in Yangon! Even those who don’t speak any English can come up with enough words to bash the government and tell you how much they love the Lady. Of course locals would be afraid to voice their opinions to a foreign journalist, but there are reasons for that. I’m not trying to say that the situation is all fine and dandy, but its important that reporters do this country and its people justice in representing its realities. This is Yangon, not Pyongyang.
3 Reader // May 21, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Don’t worry. There are also apologists for Pyongyang. You’re not alone.
Regards.
Reader
4 Stephen // May 23, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Dylan, well put. A narrow focus on national level politics and organised armed conflict in the international media has overshadowed the subtle, nuanced and innovative ways in which regular folk in Burma have been resisting repressive governance and finding space to shape their lives. Thanks to Dave Gilbert and Violet Cho for this interesting post.
5 Reader // May 24, 2009 at 3:46 am
Now, seriously. I’ve been there short time ago. Burma is a beautiful country, its people are kind and admirable for their dignity and resistance. But Burma is also one of the saddest and most decadent places I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some.
Just to stay on the two main points exposed.
- People were really afraid to talk, every time I was approaching them, or they were approaching me about a political issue or something related, they whispered, they were circumspect, careful not to be heard.
- Everyone knows that status of communication technology in Burma is, to say the least, archaic. Just to talk about the web: of course there are proxies but the downloading time is in general disheartening; of course there are chats or fora but Internet penetration is 0,6 % of the whole population, more or less: Congo has a much higher rate. And I could continue for long.
This is what I meant when I suggested to put things in the right context. If you talk about “social networking” in Burma, you cannot do it as you were talking about a “normal” country. Burma is a very special one. The fact that some privileged can use technology to chat doesn’t change the big picture, the situation on the ground. Using an expression you should recognize, this is Yangon, not New York.
Then, if you want to emphasize that, in such difficult context, in such adverse conditions, the efforts of some people in finding spaces to express themselves is very admirable, more admirable than elsewhere, I completely agree with you.
But reality is reality and I’m very sorry if it bothers you. I’m not going to be silent about that. And you shouldn’t as well.
Regards.
Reader
6 Alan Johnson // May 26, 2009 at 4:15 pm
In Burma the options for any sort of broadly based immediate communication are so few that social networking sites can indeed take on an importance they would not have elsewhere. This is so in spite of the fact that access to the net is mostly confined to Rangoon and Mandalay and a few towns on the Thai and Chinese borders. It means that at least some opposition activists and organizers inside and outside Burma have an opportunity to gather information and talk to each other in a reasonably secure forum. If just a few politically networked people have access to the net they can can spread information and samizdat material to many more. The fact that mobile phones are expensive and heavily controlled, meeting is dangerous and printed matter cannot easily be distributed, leaves the net as the only agency through which this can be done. And as Cho and Gilbert observe, the internet sites also allow Burmese, and especially young people, to express themselves free of both censorship from their government and filtering by the international charity NGOs that find it convenient to operate openly in the country.
7 tom // May 27, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Yes, Reader, internet penetration is incredibly low but I don’t think it’s for a lack of interest. If the small percentage that used the internet weren’t doing so in an interesting way, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Obviously internet penetration is a problem. There aren’t too many countries where it costs a few thousand US dollars to establish a home internet connection, which means the reliance on internet cafes in Myanmar is abnormally high. Unfortunately for the 50 million people – about 90 percent – who live outside of Yangon and Mandalay, there aren’t too many internet cafes around. It would be interesting if we could find a statistic that shows the population percentage that live within 2km of public internet centre.
For various reasons, we are also talking about a very limited demographic here – perhaps 15-30 years old. So I think for the people in this age bracket that live in cities with internet access, social networking sites are an important outlet – and internet penetration in this demographic is probably quite “high”.
Another important dimension in this argument are the 2 million Myanmar migrant workers in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, who don’t have citizenship in those countries and seem to hold on pretty tight to their Myanmar identity and this means using both Myanmar-language and English-language social networking sites.
This group would certainly boost the .6pc internet penetration figure if you included them, as well. But I don’t think internet penetration is a good way to discuss the merits of this post and social networking in Myanmar because, as you say, it is a “special” country.
8 Sandah Aung // Jun 5, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Well, I have to start by saying that I come fro Burma and Toilet Wall is founded ans maintained by a very close friend of mine. (To add a few more details, I am one of the guys who popularised social networking in its early days and my friend Nanda Htun who founded Toilet Wall is a programmer who is struggling to earn more than $50 a month in the country.)
Here in Myanmar, access is the Internet is more than what the majority of people can afford. People earn less than $50 a month and an Internet connection can cost up to $2000 a month. So, they get access to it at cafes which charge half a dollar per hour for a shared access. The connection is very slow and it’s not worth the money but that’s what we have to live with.
Those people who have registered on Toilet Wall have moderate incomes (about $50 a month), belong to the top five percent of the most educated population in cities and are fed up with hardships. The rest do not have any money to spare, are not educated enough to know why they are poor and are unable to form any ideas which deserved to be published online. Nonetheless, they are as against the government as we are.
Coming to the censorship, there are three people who are taking turns to watch for posts on Toilet Wall so that their community do not get shut down by the government or any of the members do not get jailed. That’s how they survived through those years. Again, these three people hate the government the way that can’t be described.
I think most people like you lot are armchair theorising about the situation in Myanmar and do not understand anything about what’s happening there. It’s not the way you think.
9 Reader // Jun 5, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Thank you Sandah Aung for your reality-check.
As I’ve said since the beginning, it’s important to put things in their right context.
Regards.
Reader
Leave a Comment
Please note: New Mandala encourages vigorous debate. However, for the moment we will only be publishing high-quality comments that make original contributions to discussion. There will, of course, still be space for pithy, humorous, eccentric and cheeky input. Short and sweet will usually trump long and involved. Repetitive ranting, unimaginative point-scoring and idle abuse will not be entertained. Comments which carry a real name are also more likely to be approved. Thank you for your ongoing interest and contributions.