Source: Aifaner (ID: ifanr)
Author: Huang Zhijian
Whether or not you're paying attention to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, which is in full swing, you should have heard about the ice piers of the Winter Olympic mascot.
After the opening of the Winter Olympics, this panda with ice shell quickly became popular on social networks, and the ice pier not only used various memes to brush the screen on various platforms, but also the phenomenon of the whole network being out of stock in its popular surroundings, and the ice pier was well-deserved "top stream" from the perspective of the ability to carry goods.
In fact, the ice pier has been unveiled two years ago, but the cuteness of the ice pier at that time did not attract widespread attention, until recently the animated expression of the ice pier shaking snow was screened on Weibo and other platforms.
The ice pier that originally looked dazed moved, immediately making people feel cute and soft, and many netizens said that the cute ice pier trembled and they were circled.
This is the magic of GIFs, through the infinite loop of short films, GIFs can be more vivid than text and static pictures, accurately convey emotions, and easily form a viral spread benefit.
Unconsciously, GIFs have become an important part of the Internet language system.
The Internet is inseparable from GIF emoticons, but what is less known is that the "age" of GIF is 5 years older than the Internet, and between these long years, its fate is the same as its infinite cycle characteristics, constantly circulating between "hot" and "dislike".
The birth of a GIF
When it comes to GIFs, many people may first think of GIF emoticons, but in fact, at the beginning of the birth of GIFs, it was not born for "moving".
In 1987, Steve Wilhite, the father of the famous file format, led the development team of CompuServe to develop an open source image compression technology and named it Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
At this time, the GIF can only be presented in the form of static images, and two years later, the 89a standard GIF launched by CompuServe added transparent background colors, dynamic playback and other functions, and the GIF slowly became the familiar "meme" appearance.
Reduced from 20 bytes to 10 bytes
The core of GIF technology is that it can use LZW lossless data compression technology to make computer pictures "slim down", in short, it is to "merge similar items" of the byte information of the picture, so as to achieve the same amount of the picture without losing the byte information at the same time, as far as possible to reduce the volume of the picture.
GIF was like a superpower for computer hard disks in MB at that time, making the originally stretched hard disk space more abundant and more convenient to transfer.
As a result, the GIF format was widely supported as soon as it was introduced, and for a period of time, GIF was almost the only image format on the Internet at that time, until the JPEG format was born in 1993, and GIF began to have decent opponents.
Interestingly, although GIFs had begun to become popular on the Internet at the time, most of the time people just used it as a static image and didn't pay much attention to its GIF features.
That's because according to the 89a standard, GIFs only play once from start to finish and then stand still, which makes the GIF feature seem a bit boring.
It wasn't until 1995, when Netscape, which dominated the browser market, introduced the Netscape Navigator 2.0 browser, adding a repeat playback function that GIF GIFs had a magical soul, and the fate of GIFs was officially intertwined with the Internet.
Sparkling flowers were the most popular decoration on websites at the time
This feature was soon supported by other browsers, and GIFs were finally able to dance freely in front of internet users around the world, and this new visual form of pictures and videos quickly conquered the netizens of the time, who were willing to make and disseminate all kinds of interesting GIF GIFs and use them to decorate web pages, and GIFs paved the original monotonous Internet with flowers and butterflies.
Unfortunately, this excitement did not last long, and soon people's attitude towards GIFs took a sharp turn, from love and support to spit and disgust.
In 1999, there was even a campaign on the Internet called Burn all GIFs (Burn all .gifs), where angry users and developers gathered in the online community to call for the deprecation and deletion of GIF images.
The reason why netizens are so quick to "go down" to GIFs is that COMPUServe, a GIF development company, and another company, Unisys, jointly issued an announcement that it will charge patent fees to software developers who use GIFs.
Until then, GIF had been used as an open source technology, which meant that most of the service providers, developers and users on the network were likely to be affected, and some angry netizens commented that CompuServe and Unisys' behavior was "no less than a betrayal of the attack on Pearl Harbor".
The cause of this betrayal stems from the technical core of GIFs - LZW lossless compression technology.
"Kill that GIF"
In the early days of GIF, Unisys, the holder of the LZW compression technology patent, did not really notice this emerging image format, and before that, LZW compression technology was mainly used in file compression software such as ZIP.
However, 7 years after the GIF epidemic, Unisys management learned of GIF's use of LZW, and Unisys quickly contacted CompuServe to negotiate, culminating in a technology licensing agreement that was announced to the public in 1994.
Although Unisys explained in the announcement that the "Unisys tax" will not hold developers liable for unintentional infringement before 1995 and will not charge for non-commercial, non-profit GIF development and dissemination, this "betrayal" still arouses people's disgust.
As soon as Unisys' announcement was announced, developers led by Thomas Boutell gathered on a Usenet website to propose a truly free and open source image format to replace GIF, and a year later, the organization released a lossless compression image format called Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
The PNG format was born to replace GIFs, and it surpasses the old GIFs in terms of color depth and transparency. In the past, GIFs could only display 8 bits of true color, and some colorful images would have faults, resulting in color distortion.
The PNG supports up to 24-bit true color, can accurately display the image color, and there will be no "raw edge" of the GIF when displaying transparent images, it can be said that the emergence of PNG makes the GIF static image lose its meaning of existence, in the face of PNG, the advantage of GIF is only "moving".
At that time, the developers of PNG believed that PNG should be a simple image format, and the dynamic display should be handed over to other professional formats, so they did not follow up on the dynamic characteristics of GIFs, which allowed GIFs to find a breathing space in this "hunting" operation.
Fast forward to 2004, when Unisys' patent on LZW technology expired, it meant that GIFs in the public domain could be used for free again, and the sharp blade hanging over the GIF's head finally landed.
However, GIF needs to face no longer the old opponents in the field of JPG and PNG, but the late show of dynamic content such as Flash and MP4.
After entering the millennium, the improvement of network speed has allowed more netizens to contact with clearer, smoother and more interactive Flash animation, compared with it, the color is flat, single form OF GIF does seem a bit outdated, GIF is no longer the preferred image format for website construction, and it has begun to face a "mid-life crisis" when it falls out of favor.
However, the GIF that has gradually faded out of the mainstream vision has not disappeared, it is waiting for an opportunity to make a comeback, just like the GIF animation is playing to the end, waiting for the next loop to start.
Stop asking me what a GIF is
The first to become interested in GIFs were the subcultural groups represented by 4chan, who found that this Web 1.0-era image format had features that other video or image formats did not have: no digital rights, automatic looping, and small file size.
This makes GIF very suitable as a substitute for online video, 4chan, reddit and other forum users began to streamline some network videos to the most important moments, constantly looping, resulting in an addictive viral effect, and soon GIF became popular in subcultural circles.
On the other hand, as the Internet began to enter the Web 2.0 era, people began to realize that bloated Flash animations were slowing down the loading of web pages, which made people's love of Flash begin to waver.
As refined as Flash's animated GIFs
Soon sites such as Google and Facebook began to emphasize reducing Flash animation to provide faster loading speeds and cleaner and more beautiful website designs.
As more and more websites embraced simplicity and lightness as design criteria, the Flash boom that emerged at the beginning of the millennium began to cool.
A few years later, the rise of the mobile Internet officially pronounced flash the death penalty.
Because mobile devices don't enable precise mouse-and-mouse interactions, and the mobile Internet emphasizes more intuitive, lightweight web design and image processing, Flash that relies on click interactions is always a bit out of place on mobile devices.
And Flash animation will occupy a lot of CPU resources, making the battery life of mobile devices greatly reduced, which makes Jobs firmly reject Flash outside of Apple mobile devices, and Android also announced the end of support for Flash after 2012.
However, from the PC to the mobile phone, people's love for dynamic content has not changed, due to the high traffic tariffs in the early days of the mobile Internet, people urgently need a video, Flash and other content alternatives, which makes GIF pictures and other opportunities to turn over.
Prior to this, GIFs have become popular in the form of emoticons on social media such as MSN and QQ, and people are keen to collect and share funny GIF emoticons to express their emotions.
With the popularity of editing software such as Photoshop, more and more people began to grab videos to create interesting GIFs to share on social media, and GIFs soon ushered in the explosion of UGC content.
People began to use GIFs instead of static pictures, videos and words as expression tools, and even artistic creation, such as Dynamic Static Graphics (Cinemagraph) and other GIF art forms derived on Tumblr.
The popularity of GIFs is like going through a large-scale social experiment, so that GIFs have gone beyond the image format itself and begun to move towards the art of animation.
So far, GIF has achieved a gorgeous reversal, from an old image format to an Internet culture, which still maintains incredible vitality 35 years later.
However, the pace of the GIF fate cycle did not stop, and just when the Internet was obsessed with this infinite loop of animation, another emerging group had a different view of GIF.
Sorry GIF, you're not cool anymore
In August 2020, to celebrate another career milestone, Taylor Swift posted a GIF of Dwayne Johnson saying "Oh my god" on his Twitter account, and soon a Twitter user responded to the popular diva:
In 2020, only grandma will use GIFs
The tweet garnered 334 likes, and while it was more of a joke, it's not hard to see how people think about GIFs began to change subtly.
Vice recently released a report titled "Sorry, GIFs Are Already Baby Boomers" mentioned that in the eyes of some American Gen Z, the use of GIF communication is an old-fashioned and outdated behavior, which does not mean that GIFs are no longer popular - in fact, according to GIPHY statistics, the use of GIFs is still growing compared to the past - but in the eyes of generation Z young people, GIF is no longer a cool expression.
Born in the video generation, Gen Z prefers to record their true reactions on Instagram and TikTok and share them directly with the Internet, rather than wrapping up their emotions and projecting their emotions with clips of Phoebe playing guitar in Friends.
Linda Kaye, a professor of network psychology at Bianshan University, believes that the growing popularity of short video applications such as TikTok has made the younger generation of Internet users more accustomed to personalized content creation, compared with the use of cookie-cutter GIFs to express emotions will be relatively "lazy".
If turning on the camera can record your real reactions, why choose a GIF to express your reactions?
In an interview with Vice, independent artist Jason Eppink mentioned his thoughts on GIFs. The artist, who curated a GIF exhibition at the Museum of moving images in New York, also said he no longer uses GIFs as often as he used in the past.
Does this mean that GIFs will be eliminated by more colorful and diverse videos?
History proves that the fate of GIF depends on the development of the Internet itself, as long as there is still a demand for visual creativity on the Internet, GIF will not die in the true sense, and will continue to cycle forever.