MMS

At the turn of the century, telephone companies made the first big push for adoption of MMS, a service that allows users to send photos and short videos to one another using their phones. As a natural extension of text messaging, companies like Nokia heavily marketed the service to the public with advertising campaigns and the introduction of new camera phones.

Nokia particularly honed in on the new possibilities MMS created with interpersonal communication. As part of one of their advertising campaigns, Nokia exclaimed that MMS gave one the tools to capture their lives like a movie. Heavily leaning on the idea of reality at a distance, Nokia catered to the idea of an ordinary reality turned captivating when transmitted over the air. Whie users found promise in the technology, the limited nature of sharing directly with friends and family kept the technology from booming until the birth of moblogging.

While pictures are worth a thousand words, context was largely inferred by additional text. Because the images captured offer selective views, this extrapolation is necessary to make sense of them. In Nokia's own advertisements themselves to a conversation with a friend, the addition of supplementary text and context creates narratives to motive a certain understanding or action.

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