Yang Yahan (This article is reproduced from the "All Media Faction" public account)
When we talk about social media, memes are always an "side dish" that can't be avoided.
But when we talk about memes, the format in which a meme can exist and catch fire is often overlooked, and the name of this format is GIF. On the contrary, if we mention GIFs, the first thing that comes to most people's minds is definitely one meme after another.
As a social currency, GIF emojis sometimes even determine a person's social resources, and the more maps there are, the more they often symbolize that the user has a lot of time surfing the Internet and accumulated countless social resources. Even in the video of the current fire video blogger "Half Buddha Immortal", the picture is all spliced from GIF memes.
But the history of GIFs associated with memes is more than a decade after the birth of GIFs. The history before this is not known to many people.
On March 14 this year, the inventor of GIF, Stephen Wilhite, died of a new crown infection, and when the news came, people began to look back, how did GIF come about?
In the 35 years of development history, GIF has experienced several low-tide developments, but it has constantly burst out new vitality with the development of the Internet. This article will focus on the history and development of GIFs, discussing its relevance to the history of computers, its characteristics in social media, and topics related to copyright regulation.
A Brief History of GIFs:
An image language rooted in the digital age
That was in an era when even the World Wide Web had not yet been born.
In the 1980s, files did not even have a unified format, Apple, IBM and other computer companies have their own independent image storage standards and display formats, which makes the image transmission between different devices quite troublesome; coupled with the fact that the file sending and receiving speed at that time was too low, therefore, the computer's picture transmission has always been uncommon, slow problems.
Such pain points led Stephen Wilhite and his team to develop an image format that was "both versatile and compressible." [1] So they devised an image format called "87a" in 1987, which was later officially named GIF, and the full name was Graphics Interchange Format.
For fast transceiver and transmission, GIF uses the LZW algorithm (a compression algorithm that uses shorter codes to represent longer strings) to reduce the size[2], that is, it digitizes images composed of pixels, making it a unique computer language. This means that GIFs have been a product of the digital age from the beginning, and behind them is the production of algorithms, not ordinary image production.
The earliest GIFs were not actually GIFs, and they went through two major turning points before acquiring the characteristic of dynamics.
The first turning point was in 1989, when ComposServe, the company of Stephen Wilhite, updated the original "87A" version to "89A" to add "through frames" to achieve the initial dynamics of THE GIFs – which could only be moved once.
It wasn't until Netscape introduced Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995 that the dynamics of GIFs ushered in a second turning point: this version of the browser added a repeat function, which eventually allowed it to circulate on the web page.
As Stephen Wilhite said in an interview, "If Netscape hadn't included a GIF in its browser, it might have died in 1998." [3] Thanks to this setup, GIFs are gradually becoming popular. Moreover, because some of the colors of gif-formatted pictures can be transparent, it is easy to embed in other pictures or various backgrounds, becoming a very useful element in website design, and GIFs have thus taken root in the Internet.
According to Stephen Wilhite, it was the first GIF in history. Image source: https://giphy.com/gifs/LwzI46dAzXBrFdoUld
The reason why GIFs can become the "memes" that the public is familiar with now is directly related to the gradual popularity of social media at the beginning of the millennium. Abroad, Reddit, Twitter and Tumblr were launched in 2005, 2006 and 2007 respectively, providing a deep foundation for the spread of GIFs. In particular, the earliest lightweight blogging platform Tumblr, its forwarding function combines homemade blogs and built-in viral spreads, so that any user can forward other people's posts on Tumblr, plus GIFs have the characteristics of rapid decoding, dynamic and silent, which can be widely disseminated and viewed.
Interestingly, the question of exactly how GIFs are pronounced has also sparked a naming war over "two factions": one faction believes that the initial G should be read lightly and pronounced "base", while the other faction believes that G should be reread, pronouncing "brother". As a result of this controversy, when Stephen Wilhite won the Wibby Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing the GIF in 2013, he was forced to tell everyone the correct pronunciation of the word — G should be pronounced as "jif" in a soft consonant. [4]
Some American companies even make tahini packaging with different pronunciations. Image source: https://giphy.com/gifs/jif-peanut-butter-jifvsgif-gifvsjif-jp7exGR6ueSe0k32uj
In this way, GIF not only began as a unique language in the digital age, but also witnessed almost all important moments in the development of computers - its emergence solved the problem of the inability of different computers to communicate with each other; its dynamics complemented the birth of the web browser - Netscape's browser gave GIF dynamics, and GIF became the "skin and blood" of browsers[5]; and its fire was closely related to the popularity of the Internet, even when it was selected by Oxford Dictionary for the 2012 vocabulary. It was also the time when mobile social media was at its most rapid.
We can also summarize the digital characteristics of GIFs through the discussion of scholar Lev Manovich. In his book The Language of New Media, he argues that GIFs belong to a culture of digital vision, and the paradox of this culture is that "while all imaging is gradually becoming computerized, the effects of photography and television-style effects still dominate; these images are not direct, 'natural products' using photography and videography techniques, but are computer-created".[6]
GIF Social: As an online meme
In addition to the digital nature of the GIF, Manovich believes it has two properties:
1. Meet the needs of human communication;
2. Applicable to computer-based production and distribution practices. [7]
This is also the reason why GIFs are popular on social media.
Compared with visual elements such as pictures and videos, the characteristics of GIFs are quite prominent on social media: easy to produce, rapid transmission, visual stimulation and attention to emotion.
This is similar to the characteristics of memes (also translated as "memes"). In Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene, memes are defined as the smallest units of culture— the genes of culture, that spread from person to person through replication and imitation, while a widely disseminated meme needs to be long-acting, prolific, and reproducible. [8]
Scholar Limo Schoffman also proposed in his book Meem that the definition of internet memes includes the following three points:
(1) a set of digital projects with common characteristics of content, form and/or position;
(2) These digital projects are known to everyone when they are created;
(3) Many users have disseminated, imitated and/or converted these digital projects through the Network.
Enthusiasm, emotional arousal, packaging, prestige, location, and participation have become key elements of the viral spread of memes. [9]
On these features, the GIF hits almost completely.
First of all, let's put aside the content of specific reproduction, the visual form of GIF is a simple and rough infinite loop in a short period of time, which is a typical digital project with a common form;
Secondly, Manovich's analysis also proves that although GIFs are produced through digital technology, they have a pre-existing visual influence, and, in terms of specific content, most of the visual culture that has been made into GIF memes is either a popular meme that is well understood by the whole people, or has considerable popularity in the subcultural circle;
Finally, GIFs can easily evoke the mood of the public. Taking the GIF of film and television dramas as an example, GIF emojis often present the famous scenes of film and television dramas alone, and complete a cycle in a few seconds, so that fragmented and highly repetitive content can be called a pioneer of fragmented communication.
In addition, social media has also given people the readiness to quickly forward GIFs. For example, people can directly press gifs in social media such as WeChat to forward, and directly add them to the emoji favorites.
At the production end, where the number of participants is relatively small, GIF also provides an operating space for the majority of netizens. The most classic is the addition of subtitles to film and television dramas, which is considered by Tumblr staff Hayes to be the first wave to use GIFs as cultural elements. [10]
However, compared with the basic operation of subtitle restoration, the current public is more enthusiastic about making film and television dramas into GIFs, with the second-creation lines that meet the emotions of the actors, to complete the reproduction of film and television works, and such a national behavior also happens to constitute what Henry Jenkins calls "participatory culture". [11]
GIF vs. copyright
However, this kind of secondary creation of film and television dramas, movies, news and other content has another problem worth discussing, that is, the copyright issue of the picture. Sporting events are the hardest hit areas of this problem.
From the audience's point of view, the presence of GIFs greatly shortens the attention time people pay attention to the game. A sports event can be as few as tens of minutes, as many as a few hours, and many sports fans may have more than enough heart and insufficient strength even if they subjectively want to participate in the whole game. What's more, the advent of accelerated society makes it harder for people to keep their attention focused on a game whose end can only be known at the end. In contrast, spending tens of seconds to minutes directly on social media after a game to watch the highlights is obviously an easier choice to become a "GIF fan".
However, this emerging viewing model is a challenge to event organizers, TV stations, and platforms, and it has a certain degree of impact on copyright in terms of both content creation and traffic resources.
From the perspective of content creation, for programs such as sports events that strictly stipulate the right to broadcast, recording them and making them into GIFs will hurt the legitimate rights and interests of the broadcaster.
Chen Quanzhen of Nanjing University believes that this problem requires a comprehensive examination of whether the pictures of sports events meet the replicability, originality and fixity. The mass production of GIFs has proved that the program picture has a strong reproducibility, regardless of whether the sports event itself is original, the relevant copyright owners also have the right to claim the rights. However, this issue is debatable in terms of fixity, such as the Chinese Super League live broadcast infringement case, the second-instance judgment held that the public signals of the two events involved in the case were not fixed, and only after the live broadcast of the event did they meet the fixed requirements. [12] Therefore, in the production of content, the solution to this problem still needs to be refined and clarified by specific specifications.
In terms of copyright interests, there are also problems with GIFs for sporting events. Watching GIFs after the game obviously takes away some of the audience traffic of sports events, causing a large number of audiences to lose a large number of audiences for the ads attached to live broadcast platforms and TV stations, and the main income of sports events comes mainly from high copyright licensing fees and advertising fees from investors.
In response to this problem, at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the International Olympic Committee directly ordered a ban on the use of GIF GIFs at the opening, and Twitter even banned the account of a spectator who posted three live GIFs in a row.
In the film and television industry outside the sports circle, the Hulu platform once gave a "can't beat it and join" idea: it launched its own GIF search engine website through Tumblr in 2015, collected its own episode GIFs, classified them according to the title, action and other tags, and marked the #hulu tag inside the image to protect the copyright. [13] For platforms, such a strategy is a solution. For other stakeholders, how to deal with the impact of copyright in the new era is a topic that needs to be discussed for a long time.
Perhaps what Stephen Wilhite did not expect was that with a certain degree of "interconnection" meaning (so that image transmission is no longer subject to computer manufacturers), GIFs not only narrowed the emotional distance between people, integrated the boundaries between various platforms and intermediaries, and even triggered people's consideration of production copyright many times.
In the age of the Internet, there is one rare file format that we talk about so much that it replaces text as the "Esperanto" of social media,[14] and people can quickly decode GIFs and quickly understand their meaning without much knowledge, and sometimes we can even watch an entire episode of a TV series through GIFs.
As Internet technology continues to evolve, GIFs as a "file format" may eventually be replaced. However, as a "cultural form", GIF will forever be recorded in the history of the Internet, becoming a unique culture that has witnessed the development of computers and the Internet.
Reference Links:
[1] [3] "I can't talk without memes", and we should thank the inventor of GIFs, Guo Hu
https://36kr.com/p/1670154144669698
[2] The inventor of gif died, and without GIF there would be no memes, tech foxes
https://36kr.com/p/1678375201649927
[4] The inventor of gif, Steve Wilheit, died of COVID-19 | History of GIF 01, Fenache Animation Group
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/E8l0fP_iFf6-NKk80g64uw
[5] [10] [14] The rise and falland rise of the GIF
https://mashable.com/article/history-of-the-gif
[6] [7] [Russian] Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media, translated by Che Lin, Guizhou People's Publishing House, 2020
[8] Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, translated by Lu Yun et al., CITIC Press, 2012
[9] Limo Severman: Meeme, Chongqing: Chongqing University Press, 2016(04)
Wang Jinhan. From "Text Poaching" to "Citizen Participation": Jenkins' "Participatory" Media Audience Research[J].Journal of Fujian Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2016(02):191-197.
Chen Quanzhen. Copyright Regulation Path of GIFs of Sports Events[J].Friends of Editors, 2021(02):90-94.
[13] The GIF in the TV series is a big treasure, and Hulu launched the GIF search engine
https://36kr.com/p/1647107997697