The Most Hated Gif On The Internet

*Spits Into Coffee Mug*

The internet requires knowledge of an ever changing shorthand for expressing emotions. Our lexicon of images and phrases for familiar situations grows every day. For the very online they are complex and come from a place of having seen it all. The less online still have this shared language we all participate in. They prefer the reaction gif. Like all entry level elements of a world, we all must return to these fundamentals at some point. There is utility to the reaction gif, especially in getting wordless physical reactions across on text based platforms. 

Some gifs are more useful, and therefore more popular than others. This list from Giphy has familiar faces from popular media as well images made popular simply through their circulation. They cover the full range of human emotion and many physical reactions we do not have a better shorthand for. Why use the clapping emoji when the Orson Welles slow clap gets across the dramatics of how one is feeling? One gif is missing, probably because it has fallen out of fashion even among the demographics that die for reaction gifs. That gif has earned the title of the Most hated gif on the internet. 

The gif is of a woman trying to stifle her laughter and instead spitting liquid  into her coffee cup. It used to be common in the replies to funny tweets until there was a groundswell of people who commented at length about how they hated it. The gif is originally from Big Brother. Here is the original clip from the show that gif was taken from. It is incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t watch Big Brother. There is so much context required that I simply cannot offer because I don’t know. I have a feeling looking into and trying to explain it will be a waste of an afternoon. The subject of the gif, Elissa Slater spoke to MEL about the proliferation of her face on the internet and how she feels about it.  

The gif serves its purpose. It expresses that something is funny and makes one laugh with their whole body. There is the added element which is not always intended of a kind of church laughter. For those unfamiliar, it’s a high pressure don’t laugh scenario which only makes the initial thing funnier. The inability to stifle only makes one laugh more. Laughing despite yourself. The gif gives us all that. Sure it is overused by the minions crowd but I see no reason for it to become what it has become. 

My theory is that the gif is memorable and is being used as a symbol for all gifts. It is simple and the girl looks like a couple different celebrities, especially in the grainy distortion of repetition and reposting. There’s nothing truly stand out about her except that we’ve all unfortunately been forced to develop a good memory for brown haired white women. Those with a trained eye for gifs and reality television can tell that it’s big brother but those who don’t can sense that the situation seems normal enough and does not require getting some kind of reference. She is just some woman spitting into her cup. Something we all get instinctually, a “haha I do that”moment. It’s easy to remember and therefore becomes a kind of shorthand for all gifs and all annoying gifs. 

Hatred for all gifs becomes hatred for this gif. Its popularity is to its detriment. It is easy to summarize the feeling of annoyance when one can point to a specific time they are annoyed. It is easier to cast hatred upon all gifs when one can talk at length about a specific moment of their hatred. One is a story, One thousand is a statistic.  Speaking of the pathos of moments of hatred gets everyone closer to modifying their behavior. Especially when the people speaking are often popular twitter users or comedians talking about their fans on podcasts. Stop using one gif is an easier message than stop using all gifs. A public figure hating one gif will plant seeds of doubts in the fans. If they feel this strongly about one gif, they could feel strongly about other gifs. 

In this case the gif gets a bad rap. There are worse gifs we could find. Ones that are gross and poor quality and don’t convey a real emotion. Something that is terribly hard to look at. It’s bad as a symbol and the worst part is the sentiment behind the symbol is changing. We’ve been exposed to worse parts of the internet. The negative effects of crypto being hawked every day, QAnon, Instagram face. All of it paints a picture of an internet devoid of fun and marred by tragedy. The people that used to spend time decrying the use of gifs are changing their tune. Appreciation is on the rise and there's a shift to using them semi-ironically. We’ll learn to live with minion memes and reaction gifs if it means we can save someone from being sucked into a Multi Level Marketing scheme. 

However that doesn't save our girl in the gif. She does not get absolved the way Robert Redford nodding does. We are unaware of her rise to symbol so we cannot save her from it. We think our hatred is genuine. We think our opinions are our own (they never are) and not indicative of something larger (they always are). Our reclamation of the reaction gif will not be achieved until we can free her from the status of Most Hated Gif on The Internet.