Brief: GIFs and How They are Great (Super Great)

So gifs are pretty rad. I love gifs because I love jokes (oh man do I love jokes) but also, I am continually floored at the way people use gifs to decontextualize/recontextualize, create new meanings from, and basically completely mess with pop culture. Turns out I am pretty into postmodernism (also for the jokes).

I started saving gifs in 2011, which I found almost entirely on Tumblr. When I look at the chronological progression of the gifs in my desktop folder, there seems to be a clear way gif usage has changed. Gifs are not just straightforward reaction images anymore (special thanks to the researchers at Know Your Meme for pioneering meme scholarship). They’re also favorite jokes/scenes we get to relive over and over, new jokes on top of classic gifs, and comments on life on the internet in general. And I love the thing I see on Tumblr now, where people just post subtitled screenshot(s) either as full posts or reaction images instead of gifs. Like so:

Some folks at MIT are trying to look at the emotions gif convey in a quantitative way. Users are presented with two gifs and asked to decide which better conveys a particular emotion (or if neither does). It’s a fun exercise, plus you can collect a lot of new gifs, but I find the voting results especially fascinating. First of all, I spend a ton of time on the internet, but most of these gifs are new to me. I’m usually on Tumblr and Buzzfeed – where are these gifs from? Other blogging/social media platforms? Or am I just hanging out in different parts of Tumblr? Gifs have their own sort of language and syntax, built up around internet conventions, fandoms, and social media platforms. Each site creates its own community language and idiosyncrasies; sometimes gif syntax carries through these different communities, but sometimes not. It would be interesting to see if there’s a way to track gif usage throughout different Internet communities, like linguistics but with penguins falling down on a loop instead of pronouns.

Also I gotta find a better way to organize my gif folder. I probably lost like an hour trying to find jussssssst the right gif to open this post (and I’m not sure I got it right, but come on, Jane Russell + Marilyn Monroe).