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| Trolls & Headlines |
In the recent months we have seen the words troll and trolling
almost every day in the media. It could either be an article of humorous or
satirical nature or even one of pure defamation and cyber bullying type. I
often wonder if all those 'freekans' who brag about how great they can troll
actually understand what a troll is.
My first encounter with a troll
was in the pages of the Hobbit written by Tolken. He described trolls as huge
humanoid creatures with immense strength but of low intelligence. Well our new
age trolls got the intelligence part correct. Creatures similar to
the ones from Tolkens books have appeared in other fantasy literature
like Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and in numerous movies and games like
Warcraft, Dungeon & Dragons, Diablo etc. In many of other light hearted
literature including kindergarten stories, a troll is described as a dumb
creature living below bridges and bother the people crossing it. All these
mention of mythical creates made me search the origin of trolls an I found
that they were creatures described in Norse mythology. The ones Thor and
Odin hammered around for challenging them or attacking their subjects. Most of
the creatures which we have seen or read originated from these
Scandinavian stories.
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| Real Trolls |
The second type of troll which I met was the insanely famous troll face in the age of Rage comics. They were simple drawings of faces that
describe different emotions and often were done in good humor. The first
appearance of characters like Rage guy, Troll face, Troll Dad etc was
in 2007-2008 period in websites like 4chan, reddit, 9gag etc. Among them Troll
face was also called cool face and it showed a wide mischievous grin.
Troll face was widely used to show smugness, confidence, success etc and fueled
on basic human nature to be better than anyone else in vicinity and it spread like
a virus. Troll face started to pop up in almost every discussions, forums, FB
pages etc and it even prompted another image with the title 'Do not feed the
trolls' like the one we see in zoo. Somewhere around 2010-2013 the phenomena
stared to evolve from a basic cartoon to defined individuals who take it up to
themselves to haze/insult/bully others online. And their art called as trolling.
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| Troll face from rage comics |
With the introduction of picture
comments in FB by mid 2013, trolling was established as a day job to many cyber
literate youth. Facebook pages dedicated to trolling came up and separate
sections for movie, actor/actress, sports, politics an politicians even
religion sprouted. Somewhere down the lane, trolling changed from laugh to
insult to defamation to bullying to cyber slaughter. Among them too there were
a few who promoted ideas and used the potential of social media for changes
that were good for the society. In June 2016, news articles came out claiming
that few youth from Kerala traveled to the middle east to join ISIS. This was a
news that had the potential to inflame the right wing, inspire more misguided
youth and raise communal tension. But troll happened; the supremely cyber
Kerala made these guys the butt of so many trolls that even the ISIS must
have felt ashamed to say that they are housing Mallus now.
In our days of instant connectivity and wide
reach, the art of trolling will flourish and involving in a bit of banter is
not a crime, but then when we fall back to our Bandhar roots, we become
that dumb witted monster from Norse mythology greedy for the suffering of
others.
