Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF

Abstract

The animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a digital file format with a long history within internet cultures and digital content. Emblematic of the early Web, the GIF fell from favor in the late 1990s before experiencing a resurgence that has seen the format become ubiquitous within digital communication. While the GIF has certain technical affordances that make it highly versatile, this is not the sole reason for its ubiquity. Instead, GIFs have become a key communication tool in contemporary digital cultures thanks to a combination of their features, constraints, and affordances. GIFs are polysemic, largely because they are isolated snippets of larger texts. This, combined with their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning in a single GIF. This symbolic complexity makes them an ideal tool for enhancing two core aspects of digital communication: the performance of affect and the demonstration of cultural knowledge. The combined impact of these capabilities imbues the GIF with resistant potential, but it has also made it ripe for commodification. In this article, we outline and articulate the GIF’s features and affordances, investigate their implications, and discuss their broader significance for digital culture and communication.

'The Perfect One'

“…People use GIFs as co-speech demonstrations that depict emotions or actions, or as affective responses to prior messages produced by their communication partners [42]. GIFs also express emotions [8,9,31], and use movement, color, and repetition to create sensations and affect [6]. Like emoji, GIFs are also polysemic, offering different meanings and interpretations to different audiences, and their meanings are often created within the context of a community [31].…”

“…GIFs also express emotions [8,9,31], and use movement, color, and repetition to create sensations and affect [6]. Like emoji, GIFs are also polysemic, offering different meanings and interpretations to different audiences, and their meanings are often created within the context of a community [31]. GIFs also uniquely often derive from excerpts of movies or TV shows, reflecting cultural knowledge of this source material [31,32].…”

“…Like emoji, GIFs are also polysemic, offering different meanings and interpretations to different audiences, and their meanings are often created within the context of a community [31]. GIFs also uniquely often derive from excerpts of movies or TV shows, reflecting cultural knowledge of this source material [31,32]. These characteristics make GIFs significantly more likely to be liked or reblogged than text, photos, and videos on Tumblr, according to Bakhshi et al [8] However, people also interpret GIFs in inconsistent ways.…”

“…Created in 1987 as an image file format with additional support for animation sequences, GIFs grew to become an integral part of the visual Internet during the nineties, flashing "under construction" signs and spinning email icons on personal webpage [32]. After declining in use for a better part of a decade and seen as a relic of outdated web design, GIFs have resurged through their reintroduction on MySpace and subsequent adoption by online communities like Reddit and Tumblr [31].…”

“…Although the file format has remained the same, GIFs are now used in a different way, focused on the ability to put snippets of videos into a single file. 1 GIFs often contain multiple layers of meaning and can perform a wide range of emotions, and have gained significant cultural prominence [6,31]. These silent, short, usually low-resolution clips now pervade online communication, and have become part of the standard functionality of many social media sites and instant messaging applications.…”