- Consider the role GIFs are playing in the election this year. If you consider the impact televised debates had on Nixon and Kennedy and follow that through to the point where 24 hour cable news coverage gave us Donald Trump as a serious candidate, technology has made politics more about appearance and image with each race. And this year it may have reached an extreme conclusion in a several second looping GIF.
The best part? Presidential candidates are actually playing to the medium.
I feel like the same article could be written for early 2008 when you replace 'gifs' with 'rage comics'? I don't think it's about literacy, it is more about emotion. Ties in nicely with your Pubski post recently about how explicit emotions becoming more popular. There's no subtlety, no nuance at all in most reaction gifs. It's just an easy, superficial way to show people how you feel.
I studied rage comics a lot, from their early inception to their eventual denouement. The interesting thing about rage comics is that they were an ideogrammatical protolanguage, capable of communicating a very limited amount of information to an audience that was already largely literate in the same mimetic stew. They evolved rapidly, with grammar and syntax, but eventually reached an audience devoid of the shared experience that made the grammar efficient. As such, they ballooned into ridiculous panel counts, a million and one ideograms, a billion different emotions and experiences to express and ended up diluting into basically bad comics. The argument made here is that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a short clip of video is worth several pictures. At the same time, the argument is also that several pictures and three dollars will buy you a cup of coffee and that the monetization potential of gifs is nil, despite crazy-stupid valuations. There were companies that made money off of rage comics, but they sure didn't light up the VCs. Look - Cheezburger has one and their valuation topped out at $35mil three years ago. Oh, holy fuck. No it didn't. There are fucking idiots in the world that think Cheezburger is worth $700m.
Are you saying they became a more efficient language when they spread beyond 4chan and adjacent communities? Because it seems to me it was the opposite. They were efficient because everyone reading them shared a lot of context, so the simplistic comics didn't have to provide much. When they spread and became bad comics it was because their readers didn't have that shared context, so the comics either needed to provide it or be incoherent.eventually reached an audience outside of the native population that made the grammar efficient
It's actually called Castle-in-the-air theory, it was originated by John Maynard Keynes in 1936, and it supposes that the intrinsic value of a stock doesn't matter at all, it's all about the ability to find a greater fool who will pay more than you did. So long as someone paid that much for it, that much is de facto what it's worth. Valuations work like this: Let's suppose kleinbl00, inc. has a million private shares. This is an arbitrary number, as number of shares is always arbitrary. Now let's suppose that in exchange for three dollars of startup capital (you buy me coffee) you were given one share. The "valuation" of kleinbl00, inc. is now three million dollars, because it's assumed that if one person paid $3 for one share, all people will pay $3 a share. Now let's suppose mk buys me a burrito in exchange for a share. That share is now valued at $5. kleinbl00, Inc. is now worth five million dollars, even though 999,998 of those shares aren't in circulation and belong entirely to me. You're happy because your investment has increased by 60%. mk is happy because he's now an investor in a five million dollar company. I'm happy because you suckers made me worth about five million dollars. But suppose instead that I want pizza. bfv isn't particularly impressed by my business plan, so he wants ten shares to buy me a $10 pizza. CATASTROPHE. mk's investment just took an 80% haircut. Your holdings have plummeted 66% from your initial investment and 80% since the 2nd funding round. Meanwhile me? I'm still worth a million dollars. But I'll take five hundred thousand for the whole kit and caboodle to cash out. You get 50 cents, mk gets 50 cents, bfv gets five bucks, and I get enough to buy a small condo all without ever actually making anything. Ain't capitalism great?
There was a brief moment where people were doing truly beautiful things with GIFs. Rain falling on a street. Sun glinting through leaves. Subtle motion of a flag, or a neon sign flashing on and off in an otherwise static image, a single water droplet running down the side of a beer bottle... It seemed there was so much potential, and so much artistry/delicacy possible... And then the trend seemed to die off as soon as it started, and the technique is rarely used any more. (Cue the internet commentors who will now search to find the few places on the internet where you can see these kinds of GIFs, thereby proving... well... proving my point, actually.)
Cinemagraphs, you mean. Thing about cinemagraphs is they're a bitch to make, there are only so many things you want to see for very long, and in order to create one of any quality you need to be a decent photographer, a decent cinematographer and a decent hacker. I think the practice ran its course.
It takes some skill to do that kind of thing (or some clever software, but I'm not aware of any video/image editors with something like that built in). Grabbing a couple of frames of someone making a funny face is easy. Once gifs caught on again it was inevitable you'd get more of the easy thing than the hard thing.