#Rocky balboa speech gif download#

GIFs are entertaining, but the idea that more and more people are embracing them as an actual language may tell us a lot about this moment in time, and why a certain candidate can confound the people who think they can defeat him with substance. Still, there does seem to be a long progression away from complex thought and toward wordless grunts-a complete de-evolution, to borrow Devo's term, of language. Kids weren't going to put in the effort to learn to recite three-day-long epic poems anymore. Socrates, around 400 B.C., apparently complained that the written word meant people would no longer have to completely remember everything.

In the 1980s, cable-TV news alarmed those reared on The New York Times. Of course, every generation sees some new medium as the end of intelligence. GIFs are more likely to convey just the emotion of how good it would feel to smack down an asshole. But it seems unlikely that GIFs are going to help anyone understand the pros and cons of sending troops to fight the Islamic State militant group, or ISIS. Put it all together, and it seems apparent that we're all going to wind up sending out strings of moving images to get our thoughts across. 'And we realized that we could quantify this usage.' 'We realized that they're becoming more and more serious of a medium,' Hu said. The researchers, Travis Rich and Kevin Hu, say it's a step toward making GIFs into a language. Two researchers at the MIT Media Lab are trying to create a GIF genome so computers can readily identify the emotions or meaning behind a GIF. Trump, who's kind of a human GIF, tends to stick to tweets, which is starting to seem so old school. Oddly enough, Hillary Clinton, who gets accused of being too wonky and appealing too little to gut-level emotions, aggressively uses GIFs in her campaign. Another startup, Daycap, stitches together photos you took on your phone throughout the day and generates a GIF that you can send to your friends, if you have any who would actually like to know what you've done all day. 'We think of ourselves as building this visual language, this lexicon,' Riffsy CEO David McIntosh said at the time. That way, you can just type sentences of GIFs.

#Rocky balboa speech gif download#

Riffsy last year raised $10 million to make a GIF keyboard you can download on your phone. Other startups are jumping into GIF-giving.

The idea is that you could stitch together GIFs to convey your message using not actual letters in the alphabet at all. In a next phase, one Giphy investor tells me, the service will be meshed with social media, so as you type each word you'll see a relevant GIF.

The site serves up tens of billions of GIFs each month and is quickly rising toward being one of the most trafficked sites on the Web. Giphy, with a $300 million valuation, just got $55 million in funding. Click, and you get ways to embed it in a message, blog post or whatever. Type in angry or hockey, and relevant GIFs fill the screen. Giphy, now the biggest GIF search engine, launched in 2013. But most people didn't have ways to create GIFs, or search for just the right GIFs, or embed GIFs in a message. We saw lots of headlines like this one from the Cleveland Plain Dealer: 'Text-Messaging: Scourge of Civilization? LOL.' But texting seems epic compared with GIFs. When texting took off, it seemed like a new low in discourse. Short-burst communication in the early days of smartphones meant text messaging. They're not built for thinking-smartphones are built for getting stuff done and getting to the point. We check our phones constantly in short bursts. Phones have small screens that make it hard to read anything of length. Now, suddenly, they're becoming communication. The GIF format has powered moving images on the Web ever since.įor decades, GIFs were usually decorations. Wilhite's invention could generate a moving image using very little data. Online connections were so slow, it would've been nearly impossible to send video across the network. Back in 1987, Steve Wilhite, working at CompuServe, created the first Graphics Interchange Format image-an animated airplane. While GIFs are red-hot now, they've been around since dial-up modems, or the dinosaurs, whichever came first.