The evolution of communication through...gifs?

Haters and lovers alike, gifs are in. Yes, they may seem low brow and overly entrenched into pop culture, but they are a new form of communication. Not only that, but they can be even more powerful than our beloved typeface. Can't express into words how you feel? Use a gif. Can express the way you feel but Kim Kardashian captured your mood that much better? Use a gif.

In Arwa Haider's "How the gif won the internet", the applicability of gifs is used to sell their right to exist. They are truly the millennial way of communicating in that they are forming a new way to interpret language that is based off of subjects that are topical to whatever age group is using them. There is nothing to say that communication has to be this or it has to be that when all of it is man-made in the first place. When you think about how much language has evolved in just our lifetime, you can see that even English is a never-ending journey to one day, in my opinion, forming a nearly universal language. Even then, subcultures and generations would have different slangs to differentiate each other. The gif is an independent form of communication that we have never experienced before, fully embracing what I believe to be the mainstream. While Haider denies the true credibility of gifs as a mainstream communication, they are used by everyone in what seems to be a preference. As long as the conversation is light, I myself would prefer to use a gif over a message because they incorporate so many senses into a message—humor, tone, emotion, and really any other nuance in how we choose to communicate.

The prominence of gifs has extended into not only our lighthearted twitter culture, but in the political world as well as writer Lauren Michele Jackson sees the problem in gifs as digital blackface. Agree or not, there is definitely a reasonable argument to see non-black people as ignorantly caricaturing black gifs for comedic purposes. While intent is the only true way to determine the malevolence of a message, the new way of not only communicating, but expressing thought in context to the culture surrounding us is inherently "gif."