The therapeutic, advice-slinging text message chain is a staple of modern friendship, particularly when friends are too geographically distant to talk about life's problems face to face.
So it makes sense that someone would eventually use the format as a basis for an advice column, as Cat Frazier's new Ask Cat has done.
If you don't know Cat Frazier's name, you may know some of her GIFs.
Frazier, 24, runs Animated Text, a blog that creates text-based GIFs on request, all with the neon, tacky feel of the long-gone GeoCities era of the web.
And yes, before you ask, "Ask Cat" replies to queries in GIF format.
On Animated Text, her breakout hit was the "lol nothing matters" GIF. Which was justifiably celebrated by Gawker a few years ago. "lol nothing matters" has, like many of Frazier's best gifs, become a spinning expression for a certain sort of feeling that seems specific to a moment in internet life.
Ask Cat feels different from a traditional advice column, and it's not just the tacky GIFs. Anyone with a question can text the number for Ask Cat.
Frazier replies by text to let advice seekers know when their question has been answered - those answers are posted publicly, in a text conversation format, to Ask Cat's blog, with any identifying information removed.
Although Frazier doesn't answer every single of the more than 100 questions she gets each day, she answers quite a lot of them, and quickly. The advice dispensed can be brief, but often feels immediate and personal.
"I think texting to someone just makes it super personal. It's something you do to your friend," Fraizer said.
The project is actually a partnership with Useless press, an online publishing collective.
Useless approached Fraizer recently and asked whether she wanted to come up with a collaborative project.
Useless does a lot of these; their most recent project involved persuading a novelist to write an entire book in a week, while sitting in front of a webcam and letting anyone on the internet watch and critique what he was typing out in real time.
razier told Useless that she'd like to try an advice column, "something I've always wanted to do based on the way Animated Text has become life mantras for people", Fraizer said.
Although Animated Text may excel at capturing particular feelings or moments in online life, Frazier is taking a slightly different approach to the personality behind her work as an advice giver.
As Animated Text, Frazier deploys a kind of sarcastic, cynical and playful persona, one that her Tumblr followers know well, and expect when interacting with her.
But Cat, the advice giver, is more of the real Frazier and less of her online persona, she said. "I have to be more vulnerable and more personal," she said. "The GIFs are the same, but the relationships I'm building are more authentic."
Frazier has been answering questions for Ask Cat for only a couple of weeks, and she isn't entirely sure how long the project will go on. At least a month, she said, quite possibly longer, depending on the variety of questions she receives, and whether she can continue to keep up with the amount of texts..
Source: Washington Post
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