Hybridity, National Identity, and the Smartphone in the Contemporary Union of Myanmar

In 2014, telecommunications companies Ooredoo and Telenor introduced a 3G mobile phone network to Myanmar, one of the last, great unphoned territories of the world (The Economist, 2015). Once limited to Myanmar’s military and cultural elites, in just six years smartphones have become commonplace, used by all classes and in all walks of life (Ling et al 2015). The introduction and take-up of the smartphone in Myanmar coincided with the painful transition from military dictatorship to quasi democracy; from heavy censorship to a relative liberalisation of culture and the media. While the 3G network and smartphone ownership enabled ordinary people to connect to one another and the internet, the smartphone has also been identified as a new instrument of control, with mass-texting campaigns and a toxic Facebook culture implicated in recent violent campaigns against ethnic groups. In this paper I consider the political conversations enabled in the period following the introduction of the smartphone, an anomalous, hybrid and foreign object with connotations of fluidity and connection, to Myanmar, an isolated, conservative pariah state. Drawing from Sarah Ahmed ‘skin of community as well as recent scholarship on mixed race racial identification in the country I analyse early examples of marketing communication to identify deeply held anxieties around ethnic belonging, cultural adeptness and hybridity, arguing that these anxieties can be traced back to the early days of colonisation and connected to recent ethnic conflicts.