It helped that in the world at large, retro became chic and downmarket became upmarket. 3 Tumblr’s mix of blog and social network made GIFs easy to share, and surrounded them with clean designs that made those old GeoCities pages look like the sties they were. But GIFs certainly owe their recent success to Tumblr. “I don’t think Tumblr owes its success to GIFs,” Christopher Price, Tumblr’s editorial director, says. It didn’t matter whether you were looking at it or not: the GIF was always moving, even when it wasn’t. It was a Schrodinger’s Cat for the Web era. This created a sense of something permanent within the file something that seemed to go on even after the file was closed.
The GIF allowed for multiple frames to be packed into the same file, and then those frames could be played in sequence. With all that in place, the GIF quickly became known for its best feature: it could move.
1 Over the next few years, the format would evolve to the one to have the capabilities of the one we know now: an endless loop, a limited color palette, and a file that would just work-no plugins required. The GIF started as a solution to a problem: how best to share images online? In 1987, Steve Wilhite created an image file format, the 87a (later renamed the Graphical Interchange Format) that could compress data to help it squeak through narrowband modems. Across a web filled with ephemera, content creators are turning to a medium that’s infinite: they’re turning to the GIF. Why GIFs, and why now? How did a humble file format that had been largely forgotten reemerge as the web’s definitive aesthetic? The Oxford American Dictionary named GIF its 2012 word of the year a GIF art competition was held at Miami Art Week, and it’s being judged by Michael Stipe the Guardian live-GIFed the presidential debates, as if that’s a thing. Not bad for a post that includes the term “nominal gross domestic product.” When combined with the traffic at Konczal’s personal site, he says more than 100,000 people saw it in total. More than 56,000 people clicked on “The Complete Guide To America's Jobs Crisis And The Failure Of Monetary Policy Using Animated Gifs” at Business Insider, where Konczal originally posted it. The post, like nearly everything involving GIFs these days, proved remarkably successful. One moment he’s talking about Ben Bernanke, the next he’s showing his reader an animated loop of Ron Burgundy. “Is Bernanke all like this inside his heart?:,” Konczal wrote.
The GIFs punctuated the piece instead of wonky charts, and they shaped Konczal’s writing. Guiding the reader through the history of the Fed’s monetary policy, and its potential future actions, Konczal uses GIFs taken from Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, "Game of Thrones," "Napoleon Dynamite," "It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia," "Parks and Recreation," "the Jerry Springer Show," "Glee," "Saturday Night Live," "30 Rock," Titanic, a Kardashian show (unclear which), Harry Potter, Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video, "Full House," Anchorman, Mean Girls, Bridesmaids, several famous YouTube videos, and a handful of other places. What he assembled was an economic treatise unlike any other.
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