Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF, passed away from Covid earlier this month at the age of 74. His legacy, the compact Graphic Interchange Format, has brought endless joy to the digital world. Today, visual internet culture is captured in countless grainy animations that are exchanged online by young and old. There is a GIF of every popular movie clip and internet meme.
The internet graveyard is full of forgotten phenomena (where did the MSN screen kiss go?), but the GIF seems immortal for now. A GIF is a file format with which (moving) images are stored. Wilhite and his team developed the graphics file format in 1987 for America’s first major online services company, CompuServe, to distribute high-resolution colored images at a time when Internet speeds were maddeningly slow.
Thanks to the speed with which they can be shared, GIFs have survived the evolution of the Internet; a true blessing for the lazy internet user who wants to quickly send a joke, message or response.
dancing baby
During a discussion, the sensational tweeter is only too happy to react with a popcorn-eating Michael Jackson to stir things up; and a Facebook grandma picks the sweetest glittery heart and teddy bear picture to tell her granddaughter she looks gorgeous in her new profile picture. Wilhite’s own favorite was the classic animated one dancing baby from 1996.
But the main function of the GIF as a reaction picture is something of this time. In the 1990s, the format was used to represent classic animations drawn frame by frame. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the emergence of social networks such as Myspace and Hyves on which you could design your profile completely to your own taste, glitter pictures were rampant. With the disappearance of these decorated blogs, GIFs lost their function as wallpapers for web pages. The file format is now more used for using film and series fragments as a means of communication on WhatsApp and Twitter.
In the highly polarized digital society, with the digi-skilled young on the one hand, and the often stumbling elderly on the other, the pixel images bridge the online age gap. The GIF is a bit like the apple crumble of the internet; I know few people – regardless of age – who cannot enjoy the simple pacemaker.
But the internet is doomed to push the limits of conviviality at all times. This is how one has been raging for years debate about the correct pronunciation of the abbreviation. Is the correct pronunciation now ‘djif’, as in the cleaning agent, or should it be ‘poison’ as in ‘graphic’? Wilhite finally tried to settle the discussion in 2013 by emphasizing that the only way of pronouncing ‘djif’ is. We Dutch are completely outside this discussion with our pronunciation with the hard ‘G’ of ‘just in our own way’.
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