Whale Hello There
I recently received this GIF and I saved it because:
I loved the pun.
Who doesn’t love whales?
I wanted to keep it in case I wanted to send it to someone else.
For many of us, a large portion of our online communications is in the form of GIFs. This trend doesn’t just pertain to GIFs that have a written message like the one above - we often send reaction GIFs instead of a worded reply, and it isn’t at all uncommon to have an entire conversation just through only GIFs. We can get so much meaning out of a single GIF, why write out a reply when you can neatly summarize your entire sentence in a two-second looping clip? A GIF should be more than enough to deliver your message in a fraction of the time it takes to text out a reply - copy and paste and you’re done!
One might call the GIF a lazy way to communicate, but there are actually a lot of implications to the GIF. GIFs are no different than, say a photograph, in that they both rely on the assumptions. The sender assumes that the receiver will have the required cultural understanding to interpret the intended meaning of the GIF. If there is a mismatch in cultural knowledge, then the meaning can completely shift.
For example, someone sends you a GIF: it’s a smiling man, and the caption reads: How you doin’? It seems like a simple greeting GIF, no different from the whale GIF above. But if both the sender and the receiver has the shared cultural knowledge of the TV show Friends, then they would know that this man is Joey, and this GIF is not just a simple hello, but a flirtatious one.
This simple greeting GIF will have a completely different meaning based on whether or not both the sender and the receiver share this piece of cultural knowledge.
GIFs can also be more than just a convenient method of communication, they can become an insight into the types of cultural niches the sender belongs to. For example, I have one friend who tends to use GIFs from anime shows and another friend who likes to use GIFs of members of her favorite band. Even subconsciously, a person who is into reality TV might send more GIFs of people like the Kardashians and the Real Housewives, while a person who is more into internet culture might use memes as a majority of their GIF communication.
GIFs as a source of communication have deeper meanings than just silly reactionary clips we send to spice up text conversations. They are a reflection of cultural knowledge, they express emotion much more succinctly than a long texted paragraph, and through the selection of certain references, GIFs become indicators of the sender’s media preferences and a window into their identity. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much meaning can a GIF have?
