Jason Eppink is an independent artist and curator who curated an exhibition on GIFs for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2014. The GIF was invented in 1987 and it’s important to note the format has already fallen out of favour and had a comeback multiple times before. GIFs became not only centralised but highly commercialised, culminating in Facebook buying GIPHY for $400 million in 2020. A year later, Facebook introduced its own GIF button in the comment section on the site. In 2016, Twitter launched its GIF search function, as did WhatsApp and iMessage.
For decades, there was labour involved not just in making GIFs, but also finding and saving them, hence folders like Yang’s. Today it’s easy to forget that every GIF has a creator, and indeed that many GIFs are creative – they’re just there. “That’s been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point.” “That democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders,” Phillips explains. When Facebook came along and made them more widespread, Redditors and 4Chan users were genuinely annoyed that people capitalised on the fruits of their posting without putting in the cultural work. Memes, for example, were once subcultural and niche. Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and author of multiple books on internet culture, says that early adopters have always grumbled when new (read: old) people start to encroach on their digital space. How exactly did GIFs become so embarrassing? Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge?Īnd this is the first and easiest explanation as to why GIFs are losing their cultural cachet. You don’t have to look far to find other tweets or TikToks mocking GIFs as the preserve of old people – which, yes, now means millennials.
“Who uses gifs in 2020 grandma,” one Twitter user speedily responded to Taylor Swift in August that year when the singer-songwriter opted for an image of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson mouthing the words “oh my god” to convey her excitement at reaching yet another career milestone.
And to many youngsters, GIFs themselves are increasingly alien too – or at least, okay, increasingly uncool. Okay, you probably know what a GIF folder is – but the concept of a special folder needed to store and save GIFs is increasingly alien in an era where every messaging app has its own in-built GIF library you can access with a single tap. GIF folders were used by ancient civilisations as a way to store and catalogue animated pictures that were once employed to convey emotion.
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