Homework 2

            The three articles on the history of the GIF by Paddy Johnson were very interesting.  I made a Tumblr about 4 years ago and that is where I first experienced gifs.  Gifs are everywhere on Tumblr and I assumed that they had been created there considering how prominent they were and how most people first saw them on Tumblr.  It was cool to learn about the history of the gif and how it started way before Tumblr.  One of the artists/group blogs that I was drawn to was Sprit Surfers.  I thought the gif that was like a creepy ghoul was interesting so I clicked on the blog.  But once I was on it I was very surprised and my interest vanished.  It was mostly nude people, and once I got to the gif of all the monkeys and sperm, I left the page.  I’m more into the type of gif’s that are on Tumblr.

            Again, I was surprised by the age of the gif when I read The History of Gif’s on Mashable.  The said that the gif is 25 years old which is crazy to me because it seems like something that just came about in the past 5-10 years.  I definitely think that the gif is a uniquely millennial thing because it was really brought into mainstream by teenagers.  Teenagers and young adults used Tumblr to really make the gif skyrocket and after that is when the gif came to be well known.  A lot of adults today still don’t know the meaning of gif; I have had to explain it to my mom many times.  But almost every millennial knows what the gif is.  Although they are very millennial, they are still used by those outside the age bracket. 

            As said in the Mashable article, gif’s became successful because videos are so long and take a while to buffer.  I think gif’s have become popular because you can get meaning from them, despite how short they are.  They can be funny or serious and get a message across quickly.  We live in such a fast paced world that people don’t have time to sit down and watch long videos.  Personally, if a video on Facebook or YouTube is over 2-3 minutes, I won’t watch it.  But everyone has time to watch a short gif.  The gif has kept up with and adapted with our fast paced world.  With that being said, I think it’s ridiculous for gif’s to be sold for $16,000.  They are a form of art, but I personally don’t think they’re worth as much as paintings, etc.  I think that it takes skill to be able to create animations and gif’s and those are worth money.  But if someone is just ripping a video from the internet and making a gif, I don’t think that takes much skill and should not cost anything.  Being able to rip videos and make gifs so easily has democratized art because that is so easy if one has the programs for that.  A gif becomes art when it is one of a kind and the creator creates every aspect of it (animations).