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Gifs as Language

Gifs as Language

This lightning talk was given at RICON East 2013. It was derived from a short essay of mine from October 2012: http://abe.is/meditation-on-the-gif/

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RJ24YSiKTI&t=70m30s

Abe Stanway

May 13, 2013
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Transcript

  1. “I wol nat letten eek noon of this route, Lat

    every felawe telle his tale aboute And lat se now who shal the soper wynne And ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne.”
  2. “To be, or not to be, that is the question:

    Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles...”
  3. emails, forums, text messages, tweets, status updates, yahoo answers, gchats,

    DMs, youtube comments, hovertext-a-la-xkcd, reddit threads, blog posts, listservs, inline code comments, jira tickets, white house petitions, ios notifications, stupid startup about pages, facebook groups, pastebins,
  4. # · yolo signifies...something. not really sure how to articulate

    it. pretty nuanced. some kind of "meta-irony" with a dose of contextual satyr chorus, if i had to guess. root. signifies douchebaggery.
  5. New, independent grammars. don’t like your own facebook post captain

    picard must say, “why the fuck,” not “what the fuck.” lol is never spelled uppercase hashtags are only appropriate in levity, unless they are meant to signify inclusion in a broader trend. the “me gusta” rageface signifies a specific type of shameless satisfaction. conspiracy keanu must ask, “what if” full sentences are appropriate in text messages a gif response generally contains a degree of snark
  6. It will continue to do so as long as we

    shove it into ever-shifting media.
  7. Sources: Marotti, Anthony. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric,

    p. 284 bit.ly/128FI6s Pitcher, Lindsay, Cerasano. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, p. 100 bit.ly/13hXWBW Murphy, Andrew. Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, p. 30 bit.ly/17Zz86o http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press