Online communication and fighting each other has become a pleasure, when some GIF pictures are displayed in front of our eyes, as if a picture with a voice function, both visual sense, informative and full of fun. The GIF format was born in 1987 and was originally only used to compress images, but with the development of the Internet, its uses have also become diverse and still used today. In March, Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF image format, died of COVID-19 at the age of 74. Many netizens mourned him on social media, thanking him for making the Internet more interesting. Looking back on his life, we can also see how GIF became the darling of the times.
Without him there would be no memes
Stephen Wellhead began his career at CompuServe, the world's first Internet service provider, when the company wanted to display information such as color weather maps online, but was unable to do anything because of the limitations of network bandwidth.
Stephen learned some compression techniques, so he was involved in creating the GIF format. According to Stephen himself, the world's first GIF picture was of an airplane, which he took about a month to complete.
▲The world's first GIF picture.
Today, GIFs dominate almost every corner of the Internet, documentary, entertainment, social, commercial promotion and even visual arts, and GIFs can be found in every field. In 2012, the Oxford Dictionary named the term GIF as word of the year. His wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, said: "Creating GIFs is something he is most proud of. ”
In a number of GIFs, Stephen himself said that his favorite is the "dancing baby". "Dancing Baby" is one of the cases of GIF's early years of viral spread on the Internet, which is of landmark significance.
▲ GIF "Dancing Baby".
Stephen also received the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing GIFs. The Webby Awards, hosted by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, are the world's best website awards, beginning in 1996 and focus on innovation and technology rather than business models and profitability. It is known as the "Oscar of the Internet world", and the Lifetime Achievement Award is a special branch of it.
Michel Davies, Executive Director of the Webby Award, commented: "GIF is an outstanding and enduring technology. Even in today's fast-paced internet, this format is still very popular and far-reaching. ”
The father of GIF died
Since his retirement in 2001, Stephen has lived a low-key and comfortable life, especially enjoying motorhome travel, camping and building model trains.
Stephen and his wife, Catherine, had just bought a new truck and campervan to camp at some of their favorite places in Tennessee, Kentucky and Michigan when things suddenly changed.
On March 1, Stephen woke up in the morning and told his wife that he was feeling very unwell, and then he began to have a fever with severe vomiting symptoms. By the next day, the cough had gotten worse, and Catherine took him to a hospital in Milford, Ohio.
Upon arriving at the hospital, Stephen began to receive antibiotics, but it wasn't long before he was placed in the intensive care unit. But because Catherine was also suffering from COVID-19 at the time, the two could not meet. It wasn't until March 10, when she tested negative, that she was allowed to accompany stephen at her bedside and care. However, shortly after his wife arrived at the hospital, Stephen left permanently.
Netizens have left messages with GIFs on the Internet: "Your invention has made our communication more vivid." "Our network wouldn't be so interesting without you." "Thanks for your invention, all the way good. Commenting on his contribution, industry insiders said: "Without GIFs, our Internet would be a completely different world. ”
How GIFs became the darling of the times
The success of GIFs is due to its advocating "minimalism", excellent "information transmission efficiency" and strong "emotional expression".
GIF is actually a kind of bitmap, in simple terms, that is, the picture is composed of many pixels, each pixel is assigned a color, and these pixels are combined to form a picture. The GIF uses the Lempel-Zev-Welch (LZW) compression algorithm, which supports up to 256 colors. Thanks to excellent compression technology, even in those days of dial-up Internet access, GIFs could be displayed at speeds in the 1980s without stress.
▲Ancient emoji.
In addition, the GIF format is designed entirely as a common standard, and coupled with the unconditional support for .gif formats on almost all platforms, it allows it to grow savagely around us silently. Nowadays, gifs are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and everyone can make GIFs, so GIFs have ushered in its golden age.
Although gifs have a low cost of opening, the information conveyed is far greater than a static image, sometimes even comparable to a video. When the world enters the Internet era, the amount of information is exploding, and network users have higher and higher requirements for the simplicity of information, and GIF has laid a foundation for the world with excellent information transmission efficiency.
▲GIFs are used to broadcast sports events.
What's more, GIFs are very good at conveying emotions. When a character's instantaneous expression or action is frozen to a few seconds and repeated in a loop, it is easy for people to read out a certain strong emotion, so GIF is also known as the "natural expression emperor".
With the rapid development of the Internet, the use of GIFs is also expanding.
Artists are using GIF image forms for a series of artistic explorations, such as a series of illusion art by graphic artist David Szakaly. David Sakkari usually uses black and white to create endless loops of pictures, creating a mysterious and colorful art space that gives people an immersive experience of fantasy.
Photographers have also used GIFs to create a new visual representation, Cinemagraphs (subtle motion techniques in still photographs). Cinemagraphs is a combination of the words cinema (cinematography) and graph (picture), which combines still pictures and videos to "thaw" a moment in the picture, which is a combination of dynamic photography and static pictures.
In a still photo of a catwalk, for example, The Head of Vogue creative Director Grace Coddington spins its head back and forth between her notebook and model. This gives a feeling of being static in time more than a simple still photo, and all the attention of the audience is focused on that subtle dynamic part. Whether it's Grace's writhing head, the long flowing hair of a beautiful woman, or just the heat rising from a cup of coffee, Cinemagraphs creates an immersive, special atmosphere.
Grace Cotddington, creative director of Vogue, sees the exhibition.
While everyone loves GIFs, it also has its own controversy – how to pronounce it correctly. In this regard, a well-known forum in the United States once conducted a questionnaire, which was attended by 50,000 people from more than 200 countries and regions.
Among them, 26% of people think that GIF is pronounced as "jif", 65% is pronounced as "gif", and one person splits the GIF into three letters and reads it separately: G-I-F. Some magazines have conducted in-depth research on this: people who pronounce GIF as "jif" are generally because the sound "gay" does not exist in their mother tongue, but most of the participants in the questionnaire are from the United States and European countries, so it is not difficult for them to pronounce the sound of "gay". The gifs are mainly written in three letters by Asians, and about half of Chinese and 70% of Koreans follow this route.
But Willhead has a clear statement about it. In 2013, he told The New York Times: "Although the Oxford English Dictionary accepts two pronunciations, I think it should be a soft G pronounced 'jif' (there is a well-known peanut butter brand in the United States called Jif). At the Webby Awards ceremony, Stephen also made a GIF to play live, and this GIF repeatedly emphasized that his pronunciation was "jif" instead of "gif".
News source: The Verge, image from the internet
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