Animated GIFs are a vernacular of internet culture, commonly used to express feelings. They are quite evocative! Considering how familiar and comfortable many students are with this mode of discourse, it can be a fun way to encourage more honest feedback in the classroom. Moodle will present animated GIFs in feedback boxes and forums, and GIFs will also present well on WordPress and in Pressbooks.
I once even used animated GIFs as a method for having students write narrative course reviews.
Some considerations:
- Accessibility. Like an image, students using screen readers need a description for the image to be meaningful.
- Critical race scholars and cultural theorists are producing interesting work on a concept they’re calling digital blackface.
Adore or despise them, GIFs are integral to the social experience of the Internet. Thanks to a range of buttons, apps, and keyboards, saying “it me” without words is easier than ever. But even a casual observer of GIFing would notice that, as with much of online culture, black people appear at the center of it all.
Now, I’m not suggesting that white and nonblack people refrain from ever circulating a black person’s image for amusement or otherwise (except maybe lynching photos, Emmett Till’s casket, and videos of cops killing us, y’all can stop cycling those, thanks). There’s no prescriptive or proscriptive step-by-step rulebook to follow, nobody’s coming to take GIFs away. But no digital behavior exists in a deracialized vacuum. We all need to be cognizant of what we share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas inherited from “real life.” The Internet isn’t a fantasy — it’s real life.