To “make a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them” ( Oxford Living Dictionary).Trolling itself may be understood as any of the following: Looking at these origins, we may glean that although trolling has since gathered dubious and often divisive connotations, its origins stem from “heroic” traditions and celebrated figureheads in academia. Instead, I mean this as a thoughtful meditation upon how the phenomena we understand as “trolling” has emerged within multiple cultures and has transformed within recent memory. The goal of this investigation is not to provide a definitive history of trolling or its involvement within specific subsets of internet trolls, e.g. But this does not mean that digital spaces have not enabled a new kind of trolling to evolve within the advent of the internet.

Although trolling principally correlates with the rising popularity of digital spaces native to social media, blogs, and comment sections on websites, trolling as a form of rhetoric predates the internet entirely. This particular history of rhetoric is steeped in philosophy and mythology, spanning across cultures, continents, and time. The history of trolling is a history of rhetoric. The Art of Trolling: A Philosophical History of Rhetoric Trollface, by Faeorain.

Art of the trickster