Something I noticed re-reading Vernacular Web 2, Olia Lialina points out glitter GIFs as
very "of that moment" in 2007. She suggests they might become a symbol of the time in the way that construction signs were of the earlier web. Instead, we have a flattened historical notion of the "old web" that can't really distinguish vernaculars a full decade apart from each other and both appear together in nostalgic material.