Animated GIFs have become so huge. They're everywhere. But why? On the surface, they're pretty silly—a few frames of video, endlessly looping in time. There are GIFs of Star Trek's Picard facepalming, ...

The emergence of the animated GIF over the last few years has made short visual loops a regular part of our media diet, but the phenomenon is not an entirely new one. As Chris Baraniuk points out in ...

There comes a time on the Internet when no response can quite say it like an animated GIF can. I mean, sure, you could type “WHAAAT?!?!?” but does that really capture the essence of befuddlement quite ...