正文
Social networking/discussion sites such as Tumblr and Reddit, along with image hosting service Imgur, have played a key role in making gifs a mass shared experience. In 2012, ‘gif’ was named Oxford Dictionaries’ USA Word of The Year. If you’ve posted a gif since, though, you’ve almost certainly used Giphy. This New York-based company was founded as a search engine in 2013, by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke. Giphy is now a 70-strong team, including its website, apps, and distinctly user-friendly integrated platforms on Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp. Currently valued at $300million (£233million), it reportedly had 200 million daily active users in July 2017.
“It’s not about technological development; it’s about human adoption,” argues Dr Sarah Thornton, a San Francisco-based sociologist of culture, and author of books including the best-selling Seven Days in The Art World and 33 Artists in 3 Acts. “User-experiential design has become the premium heart of technology companies. The user interface is key; it has to be just a few swipes of the hand.”
In a medium where words might be limited, the emotional impact of gifs should be similarly direct: “They’re lingua franca,” says Thornton. “They’re not determined by linguistic boundaries, and they are so simple that a child can understand them.”
Gifs do have an incredibly multi-generational scope, in their themes (which are as likely to feature vintage clips of Brando or Monroe as Beyoncé, or 80s-flavoured memes), and their users. My four-year-old niece might not yet be writing to her sixty-something grandmother, but they can freely message each other in gifs. Justin Garbett, the Senior Editor of Reaction Gif at Giphy, describes his role as “the millennial’s dream job”, but also expounds the far-reaching appeal of gifs:
“Gifs add humour to our conversations, but they can also be a unique dialect between two specific people,” says Garbett. “Emojis and text communicate very specific things; with gifs, you can add further colour to that meaning. A ‘thumbs-up’ emoji is pretty straight-forward, but a ‘thumbs-up’ gif can be excited, sarcastic, reassuring or hesitant. You can use an actor, a pop-culture reference, a cute animal, anything. Your vocabulary is limitless, and you can convey a lot with very little effort. Gifs are also self-contained, and go just about anywhere: text messages, social media posts, blog entries, you name it.”
