On the other hand, maybe I’m saying that human emotions are, by their very nature, too complex (or maybe just too specific) to be perfectly expressed in GIF form. Maybe I’m just saying that the odds aren’t in my favor: that even four million GIFs is a drop in the bucket next to the forty billion distinct flavors of human emotion. There are weaker and stronger versions of this claim. I’m not even looking for the Perfect GIF, all I want is something that will point in the general direction of the way that I actually feel. But even if I scan through every GIF on the internet (just shy of four million, according to a recent Google Labs study), I’m never going to find “The Perfect GIF.” Close enough is the best that I can hope for - and it genuinely is ALL that I hope for. (Assume that I’m probably being a little fairer to myself than I was to Wrather.) It starts pretty much the same way, with me feeling a certain way about a thing: again, there’s an emotion that I want to express, and again, words simply will not do.
TABLEFLIP .GIF FULL VERSION
This is the full version of my own argument. A picture’s worth a thousand rhetorical devices. Now, mind you: that GSAT word that I dropped on you in the last paragraph, “haecceity,” is the technical philosophical term for “a degree of specificity that cannot be captured by a five second looping clip.” This brings us to the second possibility: 2) My view: The Perfect GIF Does Not Exist. So I search around until I find The Perfect GIF that captures my emotion exactly. Wrather’s argument, as far as I understand it, basically works like this:įirst, I feel a certain way about a thing: there’s an emotion that I want to express. A picture’s worth a thousand words (per frame). So how do GIFs mean? As I see it, there are basically three possibilities: 1) Matt’s view: The Perfect GIF Exists. (Plus it gives me a chance to make a post with dozens of GIFs in it, which is absolutely my idea of a good time.) I thought this was a really interesting conversation, and I think it’s worth reviving here on the website. (On the other hand, they didn’t have to put up with people misrepresenting their arguments in a blog post months after the fact, so I guess it’s kind of a wash.) For my part, I was arguing that GIFs are always kind of off: quite aside from the intentional randomness of the /giphy tag, even the most “perfect” GIF is going to be a near miss for the emotion that we’re trying to express through it. Apparently, the thing that admits no impediment to the marriage of true minds turns out to be a GIF: kind of a shame that Shakespeare, and everyone else who lived before the Internet, never got to communicate authentically with anyone. Matt was arguing that GIFs pick up where words leave off: sometimes what we feel is too profound for cloddish language to express, but in these circumstances we can fall back on GIFs, which are - both emotionally and visually - a lossless image format.
So anyway, we’ve all been abusing the /giphy tag heavily in the back channel, and this got Matt and me thinking about the broader nature of the GIF as a bearer of meaning. (Here are the first three /giphy results for “why is this even on film,” by the way.) The results are often hilariously irrelevant: for every GIF that’s totally on point, you’ll get two where you’re like “why did anyone tag this with hotdogs?” Or “why is this even on film?” The way this works is that you type /giphy hotdogs (or whatever), and then Slack searches the GIF aggregation service for hotdogs, picks one of the results at random, and inserts this into the chat. And probably the least useful of these - and the most used, at least by us - is the /giphy tag. But it has a bunch of extra bells and whistles, many of which are incredibly useful. Now, if Slack were just a chat service, it’d be hard to justify using it. The Think Tank posts are usually transcribed directly from the conversations we have on Slack while we’re supposed to be writing something else.
TABLEFLIP .GIF SERIES
If you’re unfamiliar: Slack basically works like a series of chatrooms - so of course we also (mainly) use it to chat. A few months ago, Overthinking It Benevolent Dictator For Life Matt Wrather and I got into a friendly argument about GIFs on the website’s back channel. I should preface this: here at OTI, like pretty much every hip distributed team these days, we use Slack to take care of scheduling, pitching article ideas, and so on.
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