Editorial . . . .
We need to communicate something as swiftly and loudly as possible in an age of 24/7 information, where there’s pressure to stand out and a broad assumption that we should react to events in real-time – so we say it with gifs.
Whether it’s a bright company logo or a merry e-card, the gif (graphics interchange format) has become a ubiquitous staple of modern media in various forms. More than anything, it’s now synonymous with the reaction gif,’ a little animated clip posted to convey a specific feeling, frequently on a mesmerizing auto-play loop.
The family of Stephen Wilhite, the guy who invented the GIF, just reported that he died at the age of 74 from COVID-19 complications. While he said he “never got a penny” for inventing the GIF, his idea revolutionized the internet ecology and the way people communicate online.
Developer Steve Wilhite and his team at CompuServe faced a challenge: how to get a computer to display an image while simultaneously conserving memory. Users who wished to access email or transfer files paid hourly memberships to firms like CompuServe in 1987, four years before the World Wide Web was launched.
The difficulty was space back then, as it is now. How could a colour image file be transferred without consuming too much memory on the computer? Wilhite was able to accomplish this by combining a compression algorithm with image properties such as the amount of accessible colours (256). Graphics Interchange Format was the name he gave to his new invention, which could be used to transfer images between computers. The gif was created.
Tumblr and Reddit, as well as image hosting website Imgur, have all played a part in making gifs a widely shared experience. The Oxford Dictionaries’ USA Word of the Year for 2012 was ‘gif.’
Gifs have a direct emotional impact in a medium where words may be limited—they are lingua franca. They are not limited by linguistic limits, and they are simple enough for a toddler to comprehend.
The atomization of information culture is reflected in gifs. Nowadays, everyone is multitasking, juggling conversations on multiple devices. Gifs have a fast-paced tempo that fits into today’s fast-paced world. These compressed sights can leave a lasting impression – and say a lot about us – in only a few seconds.
The internet as we know it would be a very different place without the.gif. It’s a constrained medium from which we can learn a lot about narrative, especially given the internet’s short attention span.