The slippery nature of the moving image had long troubled cultural critics. In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the cultural critic Neil Postman bemoaned the passing of the age of print. Print, he wrote, allowed for parsing and rereading. Electronic media just slid past you into an eternal memory hole. “The eye never rests, always has something new to see,” Postman complained. While burning a book was heresy, electronic media, ever since Samuel Morse’s telegraph, was structurally impermanent: “the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.” This meant that the moving image could really never be used for careful thinking, the way we’d long used writing and reading.

For the time he was writing, Postman was absolutely right. But by the mid-2000s, things began to change dramatically. A riot of new tools emerged: hard-disk recorders like TiVo let viewers pause TV shows and scan them on a frame-by-frame basis, even as they were being aired. Digital video-editing tools became simple enough for children to use. Digital video cameras became so cheap they were incorporated into nearly every phone and laptop. And video-hosting sites like YouTube made broadcasting the moving image as trivial as blogs had made broadcasting print. In essence, we’ve seen a whipsaw transformation as tools emerged that allowed for a new level of literacy in the moving image — with TV itself as the first subject to be dissected.

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In some respects, this frame-by-frame study of TV takes us back to the origins of the moving image. In 1878, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge helped settle an issue over which horse racing aficionados had long bickered: When a horse is galloping, is there a moment when all four hooves are simultaneously off the ground? Horses gallop so quickly that you can’t clearly perceive this with the unaided eye. So Muybridge invented rapid-fire photography, taking a series of pictures of a galloping horse mere milliseconds from each other, producing a flip-book-like sequence. Sure enough, he proved that the four legs of a galloping horse do leave the ground all at once. Better yet, he invented the first animated video player, the zoopraxiscope, to play the images in succession. When he took it on the road, crowds were fascinated by Muybridge’s ability to slow down, speed up, and freeze-frame the horse. The moving image emerged, in a sense, from our desire to scrutinize the evanescent visual moments of daily life.

Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, of course, has also been reborn as the animated gif.