It's hard to imagine memes ever going out of fashion. The ways we share them, however, are slowly changing. When I was in my first years of university, we likely wouldn't go a week without sending each other the "This Is Fine" dog GIF. While the meme itself is still very much alive and well (and just celebrated its 10th anniversary last year!), I last saw it in GIF format quite a long time ago.
So, what happened? Did GIFs go out of fashion? According to the GIF search engine GIPHY, sort of. At the end of 2022, when the company was basically begging Meta to buy it, they declared that the reason that no one else would buy it was there was less and less interest from users. "They have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users in particular describing gifs as 'for boomers' and 'cringe,'" GIPHY wrote in their filing for the Competition and Markets Authority.
The whole filing sounds more like a roast than a serious legal document. "GIPHY has no proven revenue stream (of any significance)," is another great line. Interestingly, they don't provide any actual statistics, and they cite articles by Vice and Slate as evidence of the decline in popularity of GIFs, as well as a few posts from Twitter (X).
Ryan Broderick, an American internet culture writer, told The Guardian: "Gifs feel extremely dated. They were never easy to make and didn't work particularly well on mobile. So now they are basically the cringe reaction image your millennial boss uses in Slack. Rather than what they used to be, which was a decentralised image type for communicating on blogs and message boards."
Interestingly, at the beginning of the pandemic, GIPHY's popularity actually shot up 33% in one month. But what that probably meant was that your mom, dad, and grandma started communicating through messages and online. Upon discovering GIFs, they were probably the culprits of that popularity rise. That's why even some millennials now think of GIFs as something suitable for 'boomers' only.
To be fair, GIFS themselves are as old as Millennials. The inventor of the GIF is Stephen Earl Wilhite, a computer scientist at the then-huge online service CompuServe in 1987. In 2014, the GIF even had its own exhibition in the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. In the '90s and '00s, people used GIFs to breathe more life into their personal websites and social media pages.
Tumblr was actually one of the platforms responsible for the rise of the GIF. Pages like What Should We Call Me were the home of the reaction GIF. People started saving them in separate folders to have reactions to any possible situation. A GIF artist, Matt Semke, told The Atlantic that the year 2007 and Tumblr were the place to be. "This was an art form that was native to the internet. Videos existed in other places; paintings, photos existed in other places. GIFs just didn't exist anywhere until the internet."
When does a thing become uncool on the Internet? When your mom and dad start liking and doing it, of course. Assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and the author of books about Internet culture, Whitney Phillips, told Vice that GIFs were once subcultural and niche. "Democratisation creates a sense of disgust with people who consider themselves insiders. That's been central to the process of cultural production online for decades at this point," she explained.
