GIFs, Why Do We Love You So?
If you have access to Internet, you know what a GIF is- you may hate it, love it or abuse and overuse, but you can never escape it. This (animated) image format has been around for decades and it grew from annoying skittishly moving little clipart images to similarly annoying but nevertheless important part of the Internet pop culture.
The Graphics Interchange Format (yes, that is what it stands for) is actually a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe way back in 1987, as a color image format that enabled the Internet users back in the digital dinosaur era to download fairly large images in a reasonably short time, even with very slow and wonky Internet connection. Remember, that was the age of slow Internet, modems and annoying dialing sounds they made. This is why it was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites.
What it also allowed was storing multiple images in one file, along with the control data, which is enough to create simple animations. Twenty six years later, GIF is the iconic format used to promote ideas, share important messages, express emotions, make others laugh, provide snarky comebacks, add video flare to our favorite quotes or create infinite loops of video moments we could watch forever.
The Renaissance of GIF
How did this come to be? Jason Tanz, executive editor of Wired had a theory that it has something to do with nostalgia, according to a NY Times article:
For people in their 20s, GIFs are a relic of their childhood, so it makes sense they would come back as a fashion statement — just like ’70s fashion came back in the ’90s, and the ’90s are coming back around now.”
People in their twenties, howeverm, do not have such fond memories of tacky and awkward short animations of our childhood. I speak from experience. Remember the horrid little dancing baby gif that went viral in the nineties? I don’t think we’ll see much people sharing it as a fashion statement.
But we will share just about anything else in GIF format, from news to favorite celebrity moments to personal messages. This is because we, as people, are quickly moved by visual content. But we’re flooded with different imagery and sometimes those still pictures just do not have that kick we want. Videos, on the other hand, take time to watch. Even if they are only a few minutes long, they can seem to take forever. We’ve become impatient and our attention span seems to be getting shorter by the minute.
GIF caters both to our impatience and our love for moving images, as this little video that can be watched from start to finish in a few seconds in a simple, in a simple and compelling auto-looping fashion. It captures our attention and doesn’t waste (a lot of) our time… unless you get hung up on Tumblr, that is.
The Art of GIF
If you feel like expressing yourself through a GIF and join the GIF-mania, we suggest the GIFMaker.Me. It’s simple, no muss no fuss web tool that lets you create, share and edit GIFS in a matter of seconds, like a GIF maker ought to. All you need is a web browser with flash player installed and the content you want to immortalize in a series of moving pictures.
Start GIF-ing 🙂
PS In case you were wondering, it’s pronounced like “jiff”
