I shrugged off my dodgy knee and the grey in my beard. But if my beloved animated graphics are no longer fashionable, does this make me obsolete too?
t the risk of sounding like a show-off, I’m really good at gifs. Not the pre-packaged kind: there’s no man-blinking-in-polite-disbelief in my repertoire, no, and certainly no Ron Burgundy saying: “That escalated quickly.” We’re talking bespoke, artisanal gifs, hand-selected for each occasion. Sometimes, I even make my own, noting down a bon mot or a wry facial expression from a TV show and saving it for a special occasion.
There’s only one problem with this, and if you’re gen Y or younger you’re probably already doing a TikTok to explain it to me: gifs aren’t cool any more. Middle-aged people use gifs now. Twitter and WhatsApp have gif search bars that help even the most technophobic users find a little girl having a sugar rush at a baseball game, or Steve Carell yelling: “No!” They’re universal, therefore lame.
No, I have decided. It is not. Author and agitator Nassim Taleb suggests referring to something called the Lindy Effect, which states that the longer something nonperishable – like a technology or an idea – has been around, the longer it is likely to last. If a book has been in print for 40 years, the idea goes, it has better odds of surviving another 40 than a bestseller that came out last week.