

When to use it: Whenever you want to toast or congratulate someone on the internet - either ironically or sincerely. Origin: 2013’s The Great Gatsby was a sumptuous visual feast, but this meme-orable moment has transcended its context to become an all-purpose reaction for the ages. When to use: You’ve walked into an awkward situation, or just stumbled upon a major internet can of worms that you’d prefer not to open. Origin: This iconic awkward Simpsons moment appears in season five, episode 16, “Homer Loves Flanders” it’s Homer’s reaction to finding out that the Flanders family wants some non-Homer time to themselves. When to use it: Whenever the state of the world or the news or your life or anything else makes you feel like absolutely nothing matters anymore. And many people thought it summed up the national zeitgeist then. Origin: Tumblr word art artist Cat Frazier made this GIF in 2012. Here are Vox’s choices for the most iconic reaction GIFs on the internet - ranked by order of necessity to our lives, from occasionally essential to can’t-use-the-internet-without-them.

When you can shorthand “blinking white guy” and have people understand exactly which blinking white guy you’re talking about, your reaction GIF has reached peak internet saturation. The internet would appear to have many, many, many candidates for “greatest GIF of all time,” but it’s undeniable that some reaction GIFs are so ubiquitous that the average internet user can likely picture them simply from reading a description. And as we consider the legacy of the internet’s greatest file format, we must pause to recognize a special category of GIF that’s left an indelible mark on social media: the reaction GIF. There are over a thousand different hosted copies on the internet, he says, but last weekend was the first time people actually paid attention to the audio illusion - and discovered that the senses aren’t quite as separate as they maybe believed.The GIF is now 30 years old, but it already feels immortal - possibly because it’s already outlasted the internet’s most turbulent periods of evolution.
#Jumping line gif series
Twitter user HappyToast first made it in 2008 as part of a weekly Photoshop challenge, he told The Verge in an email, and it was included in the BBC3 TV series The Wrong Door, a sketch show set in a parallel universe. The bouncing powerline GIF itself has an interesting history. The GIF above isn’t the only example there are plenty more in this subreddit. The very commonness of vEAR could mean that we don’t notice until it’s brought to our attention by these noisy GIFs.

Maybe we think a sound is real when it isn’t, simply because the sound makes sense. It’s possible that many of us experience vEAR without ever noticing, Fassnidge says. And, as with all forms, some people are more susceptible to the illusion than others, depending on how our brains are wired. Though movement-hearing synesthesia isn’t well-researched, one of their lab’s recent studies suggests that up to 20 percent of people experience vEAR - which is much higher than the 2 to 4 percent number for other forms of synesthesia, says Fassnidge. (His lab is running a survey on vEAR, if you’d like to take part.) Synesthesia is likely what’s happening with the “noisy GIF” phenomenon, which Fassnidge’s lab calls the “visually-evoked auditory response,” or vEAR for short. The two are rarely linked in everyday life, and so his ability is notable for that very reason. Take, for instance, the pianist Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who experienced different musical notes as colors. Because evidence suggests that so-called synesthetic pairings can be learned when we’re small, Fassnidge says, it makes sense that many people can develop synesthesia for very common things. Going through the world, at every moment we are surrounded by movements that are logically associated with sound: we see a ball bouncing, and we expect to hear the bouncing. Up to 20 percent of people could experience this phenomena
