Now you see it, now you don’t: Simple, innocent joy in GIFs

How can one explain to a member of Gen Z the wide-eyed wonder so many of us experienced at first sight of the Dancing Baby wiggling its way across 1990s computer screens?

Not easily, is the answer. Just ask my 16-year-old, who I subjected to a demonstration of the famous GIF after learning of the untimely death of Stephen Wilhite, credited with creating the graphical format, after succumbing to complications from Covid at just 74. Wilhite has said it was a favourite of his.

According to my son, Dancing Baby is “basic” and is akin to looking at hieroglyphics. Perhaps I should have expected as much since he’s grown up with the internet. For him, the ghostly infant born before he was and whirling to a Ooga Chaka beat was not all that, even though it was everything for his mom.

GIFs call to mind what seems a simpler time online, before the immediacy and noise and flashing and rancour of the internet took hold. These days, spend too long online and it starts to feel like 3 a.m. on the Las Vegas Strip, deadening and deafening with menacing spirits lurking on the edges, barely perceptible.

Back when Wilhite and his fellow computer engineers laboured at the early internet service CompuServe in the 1980s, they were guided by a simpler goal of making digital a delight for the masses and not just a geeky sideshow. The GIF embodied that by delivering a simple emotion to make us laugh or scoff or snort. Universal emotions connecting people across long distances in one of the purest of ways.

Am I making too much of it? Not a bit. Like when the first refrains of a favourite song from high school come on the radio, seeing that gyrating baby whooshes me right back to when I really liked technology in the most hopeful of ways. Actually, to when I loved it.

GIFs were a necessary creation at a time when internet speeds were outpaced by molasses and there was a need to figure out a way to efficiently move better-quality graphics in color. The first GIF Wilhite created was of an airplane and it, well, took off from there.

While we’re at it, you’re probably pronouncing it wrong. It’s “jif,” just like the peanut butter, with a soft “G” and not “gif” with a hard one like in “gift.” But don’t take my word for it: Wilhite himself explained this to an audience at the Webby Awards and to The Times. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations” he said. “They are wrong.” (Please do not miss his perfect Webby acceptance speech, which only allows five words, via GIF.)

Maybe a GIF is just a little thing, but the little things matter. And what’s wrong with some brief momentary distraction as we stand on the precipice of whatever Web3 will turn out to be?

Wilhite, the technologist, also led what appears to be a very fine analog life. According to his obituary page, “even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind and good man.”

Basic, I guess. And cool — so, so cool.