From Fishing to Policing to Internet

Trolling, for those of us who don’t know, comes into American English as commonly used in the context of policing from fishing discourse. Trolling, you throw the bait into the water on a line. And the bait wanders around the water. So you have this idea of movement and wandering. And it eventually ensnares its prey. And that is trolling as in fishing. And then it went from there into police discourse. And then in the early days of the internet, what we call searching was called trolling. We had this kind of competition for the meaning of trolling in the context of internet culture. There was a troll, an internet troll search engine, early form of search engine. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Trolls entered into early computer lore, computer culture, which was born basically within miles of Oakland, California, and this troll doll.

Source: Pattern Recognition: Perennial characters in Disinfolklore

Traces the semantic evolution of “trolling” through four domains: fishing, policing, early internet, contemporary culture. The Oakland/Silicon Valley connection to Troll Dolls is a unique detail found nowhere else in the existing sub-pages.

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