Imlisanen Jamir
In an age of 24/7 information, where there’s pressure to stand out, and a general expectation that we should react to news in real time, we need to say something as quickly and emphatically as possible – so we say it with gifs.
The gif (graphics interchange format) has become a ubiquitous fixture of modern media, in various forms, whether it’s a flashy brand logo, or a festive e-card. More than anything, it’s now synonymous with the ‘reaction gif’: a fleeting animated clip, usually on a mesmerising auto-play loop, posted to convey a specific emotion.
Last week, the family of the man who invented the GIF, Stephen Wilhite, announced that he had passed away at the age of 74 due to complications from COVID-19. While he claimed to have “never got 1 cent” for creating the GIF technology, his invention transformed the internet ecosystem and the ways in which people communicate online.
Developer Steve Wilhite and his team at tech giant CompuServe had a problem to solve: how to make a computer display an image while also saving memory. It was 1987, four years before the advent of the World Wide Web, when users who wanted to access email or transfer files did so with hourly subscriptions from companies like CompuServe.
Then as now, the issue was space. How could a color image file be shared without taking up too much of the computer’s memory? Wilhite found a way to do so using a compression algorithm combined with image parameters like the number of available colors (256). His new creation could be used for exchanging images between computers, and he called it Graphics Interchange Format. The gif was born.
Social networking/discussion sites such as Tumblr and Reddit, along with image hosting service Imgur, have played a key role in making gifs a mass shared experience. In 2012, ‘gif’ was named Oxford Dictionaries’ USA Word of The Year.
In a medium where words might be limited, the emotional impact of gifs are similarly direct—They are lingua franca. They’re not determined by linguistic boundaries; and they are so simple that a child can understand them.
Gifs reflect the atomisation of information culture. Everyone nowadays is multi-tasking, juggling conversations on different devices. Gifs have a pace that fits into a frenetic time. Within seconds, these compressed visuals can leave a lasting impression – and speak volumes about us, too.
Without the .gif, the internet as we know it would be a different place. It's a tight medium that we can learn a lot about storytelling within, especially tuned for the attention span of the internet.
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