As connection speeds
increased and web 2.0 shifted toward a glossier our blog and more sanitized user experience, early web GIFs faded into obscurity—looking as dated as the candy-like iMacs and the much clunkier but still colorful HP tower computer my family had.
Even so, GIFs would not die
While the file format itself may have faded into obscurity, video file formats that mimic the repeating nature of the original GIFs became somewhat incorrectly dubbed “GIFs” and embedded firmly in the meme stylings of Tumblr, Facebook, and soon every messaging app on the planet.
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Today, the Internet doesn’t feel like a single place in our lives. The idea of having a designated space in your home where you engage with the digital world is old-fashioned. “I miss the computer room,” culture writer Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick eulogized earlier this year in a cool short essay in their newsletter, The Trend Report. Many of us do our day jobs on laptops, are programmed to repeatedly check the notifications on our “phones”—which we primarily use to connect to Internet-enabled services rather than actually phone anyone—and if not that, we’re on our iPads or glancing at our smart watches. By referring to an era of the Internet when it was accessible only through designated corners of our physical lives, I’m showing my age—and also drawing attention to how quickly digital culture evolves as the technology fueling it changes.
Early GIFs off GeoCities websites
are really only accessible thanks to the work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the GifCities search engine that the Archive launched in 2016 in commemoration of its 20th anniversary. That, to me, underscores a fact about the modern Internet that we take for granted: with 5G common, including in many subway tunnels, and Wi-Fi in some jurisdictions a publicly funded utility freely accessible in certain cities’ streets, the Internet can seem like the air around us.