The GIF That Keeps On Giving

Since I'll be out of town at the end of next week, I thought I'd comment on our reading/class discussion this week. The Henry Jenkins interview on youtube, where he talks about how we control what we watch, and discard what we don't corresponded well with the idea we discussed, how the line between consumers and producers has eroded as we 'take back' parts of culture and make it our own. Then I saw this article on slate.com, about the GIF (graphic interchange format)"renaissance" and how people take a brief clip from a movie or tv show and use it as a form of expressing their emotions or thoughts in a blog or web thread http://www.slate.com/id/2270819/

So in this respect, people take a popular show, interview, obscure movie and make them relevant by using a fraction of it for their own purposes, in their own venue. It's not exactly the same as a mashup or remix of something like the Obama and the "Yes We Can" music video, since the use of gifs isn't something that can go viral (unless you find a website that has a collection of them, like jezebel recently put together), it's something that is developed by an individual for other individuals. They're attracting attention for way a person any where in the world can take an out of context clip and contextualize it, or for finding a brief image (to replay over and over) that visualizes exactly what a person could be thinking.

Considering that more people have access to faster broadband, I'm sure more gifs will show up, and it'll be interesting to see how creative people will get and how they'll take a product sold to us, and use it for a completely different purpose. And with that, I'm out.