ABSTRACT
In contrast to industry scenarios that gave mobile multimedia a central place in the future of mobile telephony, this Chapter shows that something different was happening in ordinary society. It turns to the first empirical studies, focusing on how people use multimedia phones, in order to clarify the methods of expression people use in designing multimedia messages and how they interact with each other through mobile multimedia. Multimedia phones may not radically change the objects in pictures, but they change the selection of shootables: "cam phones are also being used to capture and share what people consider more noteworthy events that others might be interested in". In contrast to the domestication and the genre arguments, two bodies of research direct attention to how people interact with multimedia messages. Mobile multimedia is a personal technology rather than mass media; it functions much as mobile phones and text messages, not as the Internet, which has given rise to major service industries.
