Weekly Writing Challenge — Mind the Gap

Our blogs are the platforms from which we share our experiences, opinions, and views with the online world. As part of our Weekly Writing Challenges, we want to help you find what you’re opinionated about.

With our Mind the Gap posts, we’ll pick a trending topic in the media and ask you what you think. Each Mind the Gap challenge will include a poll where you can cast your vote along with your fellow Daily Post participants. After you vote, tell us more about how you feel by expanding on the topic in a blog post.

To participate in the challenge, tag your posts with “DPchallenge” or leave a link to your post in the comments. We will keep an eye on the tag and highlight the week’s best posts on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

Once upon a time, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the internet. Not long after, the animated GIF was born. An animated GIF is a series of images that create the impression of movement, much like a mini-movie that repeats on an endless loop.

Time was, animated GIFs were the sole province of whimsical lolcats — graduating to meme status with the infamous “haters gonna hate,” a GIF / catchphrase used to dismiss hostile remarks.

During the Olympics in London this past summer, Buzzfeed took the lowly animated GIF to a new level, using them as a storytelling mechanism as part of their Olympics coverage.

Even more recently, Ann Friedman used a series of animated of GIFs as social commentary on the US election. Additionally, the word “GIF” has been voted word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries.

This week’s Mind the Gap: Are animated GIFs the stuff of junior highschool hijinks or, are they the political cartoons of the new millenium? What do you think? Take the poll (below) and then explain your opinion by blogging about it on your site. Tag your post “DPchallenge,” so that we can be sure to find your contribution to the challenge.