In the last few years, there’s been an explosion in the use of GIFS – those little-looped videos that seem to be everywhere. The GIF is often misunderstood as a component of modern communication.
Gen Z navigates their anxieties by relying on visual-centric social media platforms, like GIFs, emoji, and memes, wherein they can both create and share visual content to express their emotions.
On social platforms, they embrace memes, visual narratives, GIFs and emoji to create fan art and provide their visual interpretations of shared cultural experiences and project their own emotions into their social media feeds. The visual narrative content posted on these platforms can largely be employed, remixed, and re-appropriated across one another and be reused for multiple purposes across multiple moments in time.
This creates a form of unity in social narratives, situating visual materials as both conversational and archival, across the platforms while also positing disunity and the breakdown of platform exclusive vernaculars.
This episode of the Australian podcast, Future Tense, host Antony Funnell talks to digital researchers and linguists about the ways that people are using GIFs, emoji, selfies and other visual communication tools as narratives to express their ideas, emotions or as visual expressions and celebrations of shared cultural moments.
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