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This article takes a cultural studies approach to analyzing what could be termed the ‘cultural uptake’ of a new commercial visual technology, mobile-to-mobile picture messaging, in three key interdependent areas: user adoption, political economic contexts, and textual representation. Nokia’s early investment and marketing of multimedia messaging service (MMS) is juxtaposed to actual trends in user adoption and cultural appropriation, which in turn encouraged the company to deploy narrative practices based on perceived user needs and later focus on popular internet-based services, such as online image sharing. The goal of this study is to highlight the complex contested ground onto which new media technologies ‘emerge,’ while offering a partial, yet multilayered, snapshot of the first few years of a still relatively new, but already pervasive, personal media tool.
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