Vanishing Culture: What Early Internet Era GIFs Show Us About Preserving Digital Culture

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The following guest post from writer and editorial director JD Shadel is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Once upon a time, everything on the Internet existed in one single location: on a Wal-Mart flat-pack desk in my childhood home. OK, that’s not technically accurate, but it felt very true to me then. When I sat on that height-adjustable ergonomic desk chair, the whole Internet seemed to rest on that particle-board desk, which sagged under the weight of the chonky desktop computer it held.

I first glimpsed the World Wide Web through an off-white monitor four times the size of my young skull. The first sound the Internet made was, of course, a screech—i.e., the symphonic shriek of shadow and reflection dial-up. A kid in the hills of Appalachia, I turned up the volume knob on the clunky speakers to hear 19 or so screaming seconds of skooo skeee skooo skeee dooo skahhh skaaaaaaahhhh skahhhhhh on full blast. It made my mom cringe, which made me love it more. This was the fanfare for us early cybersurfers, a sound announcing that we were all logging on. And when this sound concluded, I saw this new world. Internet Explorer would load the web’s jittery rhythms: a seemingly endless sea of constantly looping GIFs that felt as cheeky and comical as they felt fresh.


For those who came of age with the early days of the World Wide Web as I did, that dial up shriek sounded like the future. And that future looked like the web’s emergent image filetype: the new Graphics Interchange Format combined multiple frames into a single file, displaying basic animations on repeat. It quickly came to define the dot-com aesthetic.

The limited bandwidth and capabilities of the day’s desktop computers helped GIFs transcend technical barriers to become an icon of the time. Soon, everything seemingly imaginable had been GIFed: dancing babies, dancing skeletons, and, of course, loads of cat GIFs. There were timely GIFs for everything from “The Simpsons” cartoons and e-pet like Tamagotchi keychains and a Furby blowing bubble gum (like those I have sampled on my writing website, which highlights a few dozen from my personal collection saved through the years).

As culture increasingly flourished on the Internet throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, culture increasingly looked like GIFs. GIFs became the first widely adopted computer art, the vernacular for the first-wave of Internet memes, and the way contemporary Internet users then expressed what we today might call our “personal brand.” If you click around a few personal pages from GeoCities, the first major platform that let individuals host their own websites (archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), you’ll see how early Internet users would select a series of decorative GIFs like clip-art to express their identities and interests in these emerging virtual spaces. GIFs served functional purposes, too—they were used as spacers to define different sections of a page, for instance. They were also an animated way to invite someone to take some desired action, such as send you an email or sign your guestbook. On forums, GIFs even became avatars and the visual representation of our “netizen” personas at a time when not everyone was comfortable using real names or photos online.