THE GIFS INVASION

What's a GIF?

It's an acronym for G raphics I nterchange F ormat. You pronounce GIF the way you pronounce JIF -- the name on this jar of peanut butter.  

GIFs have been around since dial-up modems. Back in 1987, Steve Wilhite, a tech guy, created the first one. He drew an animated airplane. Connections were much too slow for videos, so Steve created a moving image with hardly any data.

It was this.

Okay, GIFs have evolved into an everyday, easy way of communicating. Blame it on the smartphone with its lovely small screen that you can quickly check and in a second get right to the picture. GIFs are faster than texting, emojis, or icons. If you want to be super creative when you're expressing an idea, click here -- GIPHY.COM. Type any word, and you'll see a bunch of choices.

Here's the GIF of me wondering about my future as a blogger....

Hey, facebookers, tweeters, instagramers, snapchatterers, and smartphoners, if you enjoy conversing with pals, I seriously suspect that communicating with photos (jpgs) and words is disappearing. 

(Why? Because many people, nowadays, needed a raison d'etre -- a reason to get up in the morning, a reason for being. Money guys whose raison d'etre is making money, are raking in billions because we need their help.)

Giphy, one of the most trafficked sites on the web, valued at $600 million, serves up tens of billions of GIFs each month.
Riffsy raised $10 million and made a GIF keyboard that you can download on your phone and type sentences of GIFs.
Daycap stitches together photos you took on your phone throughout the day and generates a GIF that you send to your friends who like to know what you’ve done all day.

It seems as if every generation fears that some new medium will be the end of  intelligence. Twitter seemed that way last decade. In the 80's, cable-TV news alarmed those reared on The New York Times. Hey, in 400 B.C. Socrates lamented because "the written word means people will no longer have to completely remember everything."

Ah sweet progress...

GIF is a present day heirogliph--
A jiggly pic that's gets stiff
In a jiffy of a jif.

It's not g-i-f with a t--  
But a swift way for you and me
To refer to (and prefer),
An impression of what you feel
That isn't very real.

Guys, I fear
What I write is no longer dear--
My blogs ain't gonna be read,
Instead...
You'll see
Quicki, bitty, vidi's for kiddies
That in a flash,
are 
    old
        useless
                  trash.

Blogger Em