The Then and Now of Mobile Photo and Video Sharing?

Hello Folks and welcome to my first blog post on the Mobile Media Futures Ning network!
My name is Stephanie Audet and I am a in my second year at QUT studying Media and Communication. My aim is to share with you all the gossip surrounding mobile photo and video sharing. Today the topic I shall focus on is the social outcome of mobile photo and video sharing and how it all began.

Photo and Video-sharing in the "Olden days"

In the so called "olden days" when camera phones were seen as the most sought-after gadget and having a colour screen just wasn’t “cool enough” anymore, I thought my Nokia 3100 was the coolest phone I would ever have. By the way, this was only around the year 2002. These “cool phones” proved to be disappointing as sharing was limited. Sharing a photograph was through MMS and would cost approximately 50c per message. So if I wanted to share a photograph with everyone in my contacts list, it would have cost me a lot. To upload photos onto a computer, I had to do it through infra-red and the only computer I could do that with was a laptop. Needless to say, it was not worth the effort and most of my videos and photographs stayed on my phone for only me to see.

Sharing after Mobile Convergence
After the introduction of mobile convergence and the popularity of web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Youtube grew, sharing photos and videos became much easier (and cheaper!) Convergence expert and academic Henry Jenkins explains convergence as "more than simply a technological shift." It is the merging of media channels and technologies to produce a set of new practices. Convergence culture enables the consumer to control their media and also to create their own. (Bogust 2006)EXPAND ON THIS
A product of convergence is the 3G mobile network which has recently been released and is certain to make sharing videos and photos a lot and easier than before enabling the use of the mobile internet. PC World has declared that “Mobile companies see a big future in multimedia and Internet content for users hungry for faster, feature-rich mobile services” (2007). This is promising that the popularity of photo and video sharing will only grow from here.
There are a number of downloadable applications that have been introduced that help facilitate mobile and video sharing. Flickr, Facebook and Youtube have all introduced mobile applications which enable people to upload their photos and videos straight from their phones onto internet websites to be shared across the globe.
When you consider how mobile photo and video sharing has improved in only 5 or 6 years, the future of photo and video sharing is promising greater and better outcomes. I can’t wait, can you?

References:

3G Mobile Phones. 2007. PC World. http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;929589163;pp;1 (Accessed September 8 2008)

Bogost, Ian. 2006. Review of Convergence Culture. Water Cooler Games: http://www.watercoolergames.org/archives/000590.shtml (Accessed September 8 2008)