Popularised by Tumblr blogs such as What Should We Call Me, which curated a perfect selection of responses to any situation, reaction gifs quickly became synonymous with the format itself.

I just learned how to use reaction gifs and the teenagers are now informing me that gifs are 'cringe'- Dan Robinson June 30, 2022 Although gifs were never intended to be a replacement for video, faster internet connections meant they were again the easiest way to share short clips – too short to have meaning on their own but perfect for adding context and colour to posts in the form of the “reaction gif”.

Its revival came at the turn of the 2010s, alongside the growth of the social network Tumblr. It exploded in popularity alongside the rise of the web as the easiest way to add motion to a page but it slowly lost ground to other ways of showing pictures that required less of the limited bandwidth of the time. The animated gif is also comfortably millennial: invented in 1989, it pre-dates not only smartphones and social media but even the world wide web. It’s actually kind of sad how choked out the gif was by large corporations, copyright laws, and mobile browsers.” Rather than what they used to be, which was a decentralised image type for communicating on blogs and message boards. “So now they are basically the cringe reaction image your millennial boss uses in Slack. They were never easy to make and didn’t work particularly well on mobile. The generational divide is real, says the internet culture writer Ryan Broderick. Someone last week told me GIFs are for boomers and I have felt self-conscious ever since- Chris Brown July 14, 2022

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