A Brief History of Trolls and Trolling

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.

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.

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.