![]() ![]() "All of a sudden it's used everywhere," he says. People might create a GIF set of their favorite scene from a film, and that post gets flagged and reposted, and then somebody might take one of those images, save it to their hard drive and use it as a reaction GIF. "GIFs were perfect for Tumblr, because people started using them in ways not just to express themselves but in a reblog so they spread really fast," Cheese explains. It also resulted in people using and reappropriating GIFs to suit their own purposes. It has led to people making GIFs in all kinds of different contexts-as works of art, as sets of instructions, and even for making porn, says Cheese. "What happens on the Internet is when people migrate from forum to forum they take their culture with them," says Cheese. It is this union that spread the culture of GIF creation far and wide. While even Queen Flash realizes her reign is over, along comes Prince Tumblr into the subculture forest, where he meets and falls in love with GIF (Prince Tumblr: "Your work gives me all the feels" GIF: "lol thanks"). "You're now using GIFs on forums instead of writing a 200-word response." "This is creating these small moments in time that we're able to share with one another," says Cheese. ![]() The forum users get to work making GIFs, simply for the purpose of having fun and expressing themselves. Advertisementįortunately for GIF, the trolls take her in, and she makes her GIFs again using viral video clips and NSFW webcam footage, which lays the foundation for the viral Web. When the queen dies, the king remarries, and his new queen-Queen Flash-decides to banish GIF to the subculture forest, as her magic mirror on the wall-the tech blogs-tell her she is no longer the most useful format of them all. The king and queen have a daughter called GIF, who is considered a novelty, but is not taken seriously as "she can render rainbows and unicorns," even though all she wants to do is be useful. "There was a king named browser and a queen named CompuServe," he begins. The GIF has a story of its own-a fairytale, in fact-but it is a story based on emotion, not fact. "I don't think it's the facts that are important," he continues. When he looked it up on a Wikipedia, all that was there was a description of what it was and where it came from, but a disappointing lack of insight into its cultural significance. The GIF, he continues, is a 30-year-old file format which is woefully inefficient and yet, despite all the innovation in technology, is used to tell stories all over the Internet today. "Our myths that we have don't necessarily reflect the things that we do, so I want to create new myths," he says. Cheese helps to run the Doctor Who Tumblr for BBC America, the second biggest Tumblr in the world and was also a cofounder of Know Your Meme.Ĭheese describes himself as being "of the Internet," but says he is mainly interested in the way people do things online. "The reason everyone thought MySpace was going to die was because these (GIFs) are really ugly," says meme-master general Kenyatta Cheese, speaking at the Story Festival in London.
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