The GIF-sharing site has apologised for the temporary lack of access to the tiny green cutie, although initially online users believed that Disney itself had pulled them so as to make more money out of selling merchandise further down the line.Įarlier this year, Twitter users pronounced themselves shocked to discover that a popular GIF of a man nodding was in fact a very specific and famous man: Robert Redford in the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson. There was an outcry recently, for example, when the adorable GIFs of the ‘Baby Yoda’ character from new show The Mandalorian disappeared overnight from Giphy. And because each GIF can mean whatever we want them to mean, we increasingly consider them our property rather than that of the original creators. Simply let Leo and Boo do the talking for you, in a few carefully chosen frames, ripped from a digital file.įilm and TV GIFs have joined the rest of our online visual shorthand: the memes, likes, favourites and emojis that speed up our conversations and, arguably, reduce our attention spans. GIFs are easy to make, and even easier to share. That GIF support is powered by platforms such as Giphy (founded in 2013) and Tenor (founded in 2014): hosting sites where users, or brands, can upload GIFs for other people to use. In 2015, almost every social media platform you can think of added GIF keyboards to its messaging and commenting options. In 2012, the Oxford English Dictionary made ‘GIF’ its word of the year, and while Wilhite insists it is pronounced with a soft g, he is practically a lone voice among the millions who say otherwise. But the GIF as we know it today is a true child of the 2010s. If you were online in the noughties you saw your fair share of these too: MySpace launched in 2003, and users customised their pages lavishly with GIFs. Tiny looping animations spread all over early web pages, not to mention blinking banner ads that induced ferocious headaches. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s and the early days of the World Wide Web that the GIF took off. Two years later, in 1989, CompuServe introduced what now looks like a gamechanger, animation support. The original Graphics Interchange Format is two years older: it was invented by Steve Wilhite at CompuServe on June 15, 1987, as a compressed image format offering high quality at a smaller file size that could be used by all kinds of computers. The animated GIF celebrated its 30th birthday in 2019 – it’s the same age as the web itself. On the other, these snippets are rarely credited to the original work or even to the individual GIF-makers, and can have their original meaning and relevance twisted beyond comprehension. On the one hand, you can take a sweeping glance at Twitter or WhatsApp and find modern visual culture celebrated like never before. So much so that it’s increasingly unusual to find an online conversation that isn’t peppered with brief, seconds-long clips, often completely dissociated from their sources. GIFs culled from films and TV shows have exploded across social media in recent years.
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