What is a GIF?
A GIF is a multi-image graphics file with a preset time parameter. It is more commonly seen as a repeating animation or video clip only a few seconds long. Popular GIFs as memes create these files from longer, popular film and television clips and remix them with text. GIFs are in essence a moving meme.
Ultimate Meme Montage Part 1 (Youtube)
This video shows some of the most popular clips from films, television, video games, viral YouTube videos, and animations that have been used in GIF memes. In a GIF, the sound would be muted and text applied to the repeated clip as in a photo meme.
What makes a GIF funny or successful?
GIFS are a type of meme, and photobloggers around the globe are buying into the trend. Why are GIFS becoming so popular? What makes them entertaining to watch? Thought Catalog ran an article called "Why We Love Animated GIFs" to get to the bottom of the hype over why we love to procrastinate by watching short clips repeat themselves again...and again...and again.
"When made well, animated GIFs feel like an evolution on the still photo, like some technology evolution that keeps pictures form freezing in time as up until now we have expected them to."
"GIFs pull into sharp focus the tiny detail we don't get to catch in the sonorous, overwhelming broader media landscape, thereby creating out of the familiar something that feels brand-new unto itself."
-"Why We Love Animated GIFs", Thought Catalog 5.24.2011 (Leigh Alexander)
Popular GIF Blogs
GIFs are indicative of post-industrial Internet trends that mix technology and culture.
Additionally, GIFs are a clear example of how memes represent the coevolution of technology and culture. By incorporating collaboration, juxtapositions of catchphrases on top of (mostly) copyrighted animated clips and accessibility, GIFs expose how post-industrialism is represented in social media and Internet culture in general. (Howe, Lessig, Rheingold, Wells & Rainie).
STANFORD MEMES
And some ity-bity GIF-in, too
The Social Media and Virtual Community Project