Category: Group B

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At one point in your YouTube viewing career, you have bound to come across a clip that spoke to you as violent, racial, or stereotypical. You may wonder why these seemingly “inappropriate” videos remain on the site for all to see. One of the most infamous cases  happened when Texas native Hillary Adams posted a video of herself as a child getting beaten and abused by her father, who just so happened to be a FAMILY COURT JUDGE. See it for yourself, at your own peril.

I was able to just pluck this video from YouTube today because it is still on the site. Which brings up the question: Should it remain on YouTube? On the one side, these clips can expose to individuals how bad violence could be. Also, it could show footage that is impossible to pull up in a written or spoken account, which can help for law enforcement. However, on the other hand, is this really appropriate for the random Internet user to see? Select people may use these clips as an inspiration to inflict damage on others, which could snowball into a larger issue. Per YouTube’s Community Guidelines, “It’s not okay to post violent or gory content that’s primarily intended to be shocking, sensational, or disrespectful.” So, if Adams’ menacing video remains on the site, why? Unfortunately, one reason might be monetary. According to our reading by Sarah Roberts, “I noted that a number of (these similar videos) were preceded by commercial advertising”. Since only well-viewed videos ever receive ads before them, clips like these somehow manage to continue to get by the CCMs. This creates real tension between Google’s profitability and the question of a video staying up. In my opinion, there are more than enough ways for Google to make superior earnings than by showing horrid violence to the masses. In YouTube’s Guidelines, a sentence about inappropriate videos reads “Don’t cross the line”. Where, then, is that line?

 

 

Sources:

 

“Community Guidelines.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/yt/policyandsafety/communityguidelines.html.

 

Roberts, Sarah T. “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborer’s Dirty Work.” Digital Formations, vol. 105, 2016, pp. 147–159., www.dropbox.com/s/gbup3cq4w90bmi0/Roberts%20-%20Content%20Moderation%20%282016%29.pdf?dl=0.

 

 

Posted from My blog by Wes K.

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After reading Jason Eppink’s “A Brief History of the GIF”, I was pretty shocked to read about the debate regarding how GIF should be pronounced. While I see GIFs almost every single day, I have never once stopped to think about how the acronym is supposed to be said because I always assumed the ‘G’ in GIF would be hard. I decided to look around on the Internet to read a little more about this apparently raging debate.

Funnily enough, the first web page Google found when I searched “GIF or JIF controversy” was called “How to Really Pronounce GIF” (Find the website at this fitting url ). One of the first things visible on the web page is the line, ‘It’s pronounced with a hard G, “GIF”, like “gift”’. The website even offers the option for those who agree to buy t-shirts that express this view.

Source

While there are a significant number of people who agree, as Eppink points out, the principal engineer of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, argues vehemently that the ‘G’ should be soft. In fact, upon being honored at the 2013 Webby Awards, he responded by announcing, “IT’S PRONOUNCED ‘JIF’ NOT ‘GIF’” (Eppink 301, link to full text here ).

While the debate rages on, it appears that the hard G pronunciation is more common, as a 2012 LA Times poll shows that people are close to twice as likely to pronounce the word with a hard ‘G’ (Link to LA Times poll here). And though the debate may seem a bit silly, it is something that has been widely debated amongst the Internet community for some time now. I think the following GIF sums up the debate pretty well.

Source

So, one questions remains: how do you pronounce “GIF”??

Posted from Digital Studies 101 Blog by Patrick G.

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As we have read in the reading’s GIF’s or Graphic Interchange Format are taking the world by storm and seem to be everywhere. What I found particularly interesting in the reading was the fact that the creator of the GIF itself is unknown or deemphasized.

Considering today’s culture with celebrities and the American dream being obsessed with become rich and famous, the fact the GIF, “inventors”, if you will, don’t take credit for their GIF’s and aren’t recognized for their art is a curious matter. I have a couple theories that may explain this strange phenomenon.

First Theory: The “inventors” of GIF’s deliberately don’t take credit for their GIF’s because they don’t want to appear nerdy. In today’s day and age we idolize famous people as I’ve stated, however, by doing this, we also look down upon the hidden video gamer/ meme maker/ Gif maker/ basement dweller. When we picture the inventors of GIF’s we don’t immediately think of wealthy people who are doing this for the good of humanity, instead we think of a 37 year old, living in his parents basement, making GIF’s and memes because he/she thinks they are funny and they are bored out of their minds. We don’t want to be like the second obviously, and that’s why I don’t think some GIF inventors take credit for their GIF’s.

Second Theory: Anyone and everyone can make a GIF so it isn’t that impressive to “invent” one. This theory is probably more likely. According to the article we read, Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of The Animated GIF, written by Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield,” In October 2016, Giphy announced it was serving more than 1 billion GIFs to over 100 million active users every day”. As we see through this absurd statistic, GIF’s are super popular and billions of GIF’s are used, which leads back to my hypothesis, that anyone and everyone can make one, thus the inventors don’t take credit for the GIF’s they create.

Above is a video about the inventor of the GIF and some hilarious examples.

 

Bibliography:

GIF inventor video:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUmVvocbrgQ

Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF, written by Kate M miltner and Tim Highfield

A brief History of the GIF (so far), written by Jason Eppink

Posted from My blog by Nile

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The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr explains that people, especially younger generations, are becoming more and more used to reading shorter texts because of online reading. Reading is not an instinctive skill, and as technology has replaced older forms of entertainment and information (books, newspaper, etc.), we have collectively lost the ability to read for long lengths and become distracted. Studies have found that the reading style that has replaced this is one similar to skimming. Rather than reading books to gain information, the answer to most things is just a few clicks away, and requires very little reading, or can even be fulfilled visually through television.

So the popularity of listicles is no surprise to me – visually stimulating with easy-to-comprehend bullets. GIFs have become heavily ingrained in listicles, popular on sites like Buzzfeed, Snapchat, and amateur blogs like Odyssey or Her Campus.

A recent Her Campus article titled “10 Signs that You Are ~Basic~ at Davidson” caught my attention, partly because of its direct impact on Davidson but mainly because it was so unsuccessful at being a relatable listicle. And the GIFs employed didn’t make it any more relatable.

And I wasn’t the only one who thought so, according to some feedback it received on Facebook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what I want to focus on is the use of GIFs in this article. They did not help to make the article any more relatable. As discussed in “Never Gonna GIF You Up”, “the selection and presentation of GIFs are also a performance of cultural knowledge,” demonstrating “user’s knowledge of a certain text or cultural conversation through their choices” (Miltner and Highfield 6). Much of this article made GIFs into a form of high art (for lack of better phrase), such as with the layers of meaning, the polysemy of remix, and decontextualization. While I did agree with a lot of their argument, I found myself wondering if there is a new wave of GIFs, propelled by listicles, that isn’t so concerned about the “Russian doll of cultural meaning” but is simply visually stimulating (7). I do agree that GIFs are appealing because they have so many possible interpretations, but when reading this Her Campus article, there wasn’t much room left to interpret.

Because the GIFs were very loosely connected to the bullets in the listicle, it felt like these GIFs were picked arbitrarily through the use of a GIF archive. For example, the author typed “spin class” and picked one that clearly showed a spin class. Do GIF databases that allow GIFs to be searched for based on keywords take away from the “performance of cultural knowledge”? In this spin class example, the GIF is from the Fox sitcom New Girl. Which makes sense, since the audience is young adult women (I mean, I did get the reference), but the GIF didn’t add anything to the statement, other than some slight comedy.

Miltner and Highfield touched on the popularity of TV related GIFs, saying that “part of the reason that these genres are so prevalent is that the texts contained within them follow production tropes that make them eminently repeatable: over-the-top characters, dramatic editing styles, heightened gestures, and to-camera confessional asides” (7). Three out of the five GIFs in the article (to my knowledge/context clues) originate from TV shows. It is because of this point that I am okay with inclusion of the GIFs. Even if it didn’t make the content of the article more relatable, they TV related GIFs were familiar tropes and visually stimulating.

While this article is by no means the pinnacle of well-chosen GIFs, it is not the first time I’ve questioned the inclusion of GIFs in an article. Is it enough to say that an article benefits from GIFs because they are captivating or because the audience might recognize the origin? In cases where I don’t feel they add much to the site, it annoys me because the overuse of GIFs make my browser run slower. One of the questions that should be asked about GIF futures is will people continue to keep in mind the meanings of GIFs or simply use them as a way to grab the reader’s attention? In a technologically dependent culture, like how we have lost the ability to read for long lengths, will we become accustomed to the integration of images/GIFs and listicles before we get fidgety or distracted?

Bibliography

Carr, Nicholas. ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company. 27 Apr. 2017.

Nortier, Leigha. “10 Signs That You Are ~Basic~ at Davidon.” Her Campus. 21 Sept. 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted from Intro to Digital Studies by Lauren C.

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After years of obscurity, the GIF has made a mammoth-sized comeback to the Internet. These moving pictures evoke emotion and affect on those who view them combined with the power of pop culture. As our reading tells us, the rhetoric of GIFS “allows the user to provide a visual representation of how they are feeling, or how they act in a particular situation—expressions which are perhaps less well suited to text; GIFs are “a visual language unto themselves, an emotive vocabulary made out of culture””(Miltner and Highfield). One of the sites that has really taken advantage of this popular internet trend is Buzzfeed. They specialize in creating what are known as “listicles”, or articles centered around a list of certain points about a topic. Many of these contain GIFS for each point the Buzzfeed writer is trying to make. This one in particular was created for Netflix crazed college students, comparing their emotions during finals with scenes from the popular TV show The Office. This article shines when it comes to audience identification, since the emotions taken by the show’s characters accurately depict “our” emotions as students during the scenarios listed. For example, situations include “when you read the first question of a test and struggle”(Pentak) or “when you thought you aced your test” (Pentak). Each scenario is accompanied by a GIF featuring a character or more from the show.

This not only gives the “same I feel this too” feeling but also gives a comical feeling, especially if you have seen the show. Some GIFS even have text inside of the comments that the actor(s) made in the scene to give more context and further add to the effect, especially to those who have seen the episodes. Even though I have only watched a few shows of The Office, I still find the GIFS funny and relatable due to the quirkiness of the characters. So you do not even need to be an Office superfan to have fun reading this listicle. The listicle in particular is so effective due to the amount of college students who are also fans of the show. Ironically, some students spend time procrastinating from their work watching the show, which makes this GIF hilarious.

From this example, it is clear that the power of GIFs has opened up a new way for us to communicate and to be entertained online.

 

Sources:

Highfield, Tim, and Kate M Miltner. “Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF.” Social Media + Society, 2017. Sage Journals, SAGE Publications, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117725223.

Pentak, Amanda. “26 Times ‘The Office’ Perfectly Understood Your Finals Week.” Buzzfeed, 16 Apr. 2016.

Posted from My blog by Wes K.