Internet culture: Has the GIF grown up?

The GIF or Graphics Interchange Format has long been defined by silly and lighthearted contributions to online culture, butit has also gained steam as a serious and increasingly accessiblestorytelling tool.

In a milestone year, the compressed file format celebrated its25th birthday andenjoyed recognitionas the Oxford dictionarys U.S. word of the year for 2012.

'The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism.' Katherine Martin

Themost popular GIFs shared online aretypically animated, colourful, andintentionally entertaining. They feature animals doing funny things, accidental happenings and snippets from popular culture.

It's "catnip for the internet," says popular tech site Gizmodo.

But GIFs also played a role in major news stories in 2012, a large part of the reason the Oxford University Press definedthe word thisway:

GIF:verb. To create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event): "He GIFed the highlights of the debate."

"Like so many other relics of the '80s,[the GIF]has never been trendier," Katherine Martin, head of the U.S. Dictionaries Program at OUP, said ina statement.

"The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace."

Oxford University Presshighlighted the amount of GIFing done during the 2012 Olympics in London,exemplified by The Atlantic's coverage of the vault event.

The magazine wove a series ofbotched landings betweenparagraphs that referred to them,an approach that was more telling than stills and alsoeasier on the internet connection than videos, because compressed images load more quickly. Other mainstream media outlets, like the New York Times, Business Insider and CBC News have experimented with the format in ways that would have raised eyebrows in previous years.

During theU.S. presidential election, for instance,many media outlets live-GIFed key moments and catchphrases such as Mitt Romney's much repeated "binders full of women."

The GIFs of the people

But journalists are not the only ones who have been working GIFs into their routines.

Last yearsaw the creation of apps likeWeGIF and Motiongraph that put the tools of GIF-making in the hands of the masses. Many such apps are competing to become the GIFing equivalent of the wildly popular (ifrecently criticized) picture sharing platform Instagram.

One of the top contenders is Cinemagram, a small startup with roots inMontreal,which has attractedmillions of active userssince launching as a free app in March.

The number of people signing up each day is in the tens of thousands, says community manager Katie Sehl.

"We dont think its just a flash in the pan," she said, adding that GIFingwill increasingly becomeone of the ways people are communicating. Many users, she noted, have used the app to tell news stories from their point of view.

• 6 GIFS that personalized the news in 2012

"The news aspect is something we had not anticipated initially, but are really excited about," Sehl said. "Every news story is huge for our users: Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 election, even Black Friday."

Devin Feldman,a 19-year-old U.S. college student who runsthe popular Twitter account@GIF_Master, says the use of GIFs in news coverage could make storiesmore appealing to his generation.

"Honestly, I think about Harry Potter," he said, referencing newspapers shown in the boy wizard movies wherethe photographs move.The politician on the front page, he said, would seem more alive.

"You dont just see some bad angle, but the reaction on their face."

Manysites that feature GIFs prominently, like blog hosting platformTumblr, still focus on lighthearted fare andcheeky ways ofexpressing emotion. However,several now include newsworthy GIFs. The GIF Hound's Tumblr blog, for instance, is dedicated to capturing key moments from current events.

"The Obama campaign released video today of the president thanking his staff post-re-election victory," notes thecurator in oneentry. The GIF featured the moment U.S. President Barack Obama wiped a tear from his eye. "He got a little emotional."

IfGIFs of a serious nature become more commonplace, and if higher resolution GIFs become easier to make and share,the usage of the 25-year-old format could gain new life and become more widespread.

Sehlsaid pigeonholing the format as frivolous ignoresits expressive potential. Shehas seen userscreate GIFs aboutissues from the headlines as well as the emotionally chargedstories from their own lives.

"One user used Cinemagram to track his brother's progression in coming out of a coma," she said. "GIFs can be whatever you want them to be."