If everyone is a troll, maybe no one is.

In the past few years, accusations of "trolling" have flown across the Internet fast and furious; recently, the targets have included a New York Times feature about the popularity of chopped salads, just about everything Vice does, and a cover of Rolling Stone featuring Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Advertisement:

But for a word that's tossed around so frequently, its meaning seems to evaporate into air when grasped at. Trolling is bad. Trolling provokes a reaction, usually negative. Trolling is apparently quite easy to do. But, if only to better gird one's own defenses against it -- what is trolling?

"I think that it started with a pretty clear definition -- which is somebody who goes into a place that shares a particular ideology and says something they don't believe just to get a reaction," said Sady Doyle, a feminist blogger and staff writer for In These Times.

"Originally, it was, like, racist Reddit kids going into r/blackgirls -- that was old-school trolling, a very specific online behavior," said Matt Buchanan, a tech blogger for the New Yorker, referring to the popular message board and clearinghouse for human pathologies in which racist, sexist or homophobic vitriol flowed freely. On Reddit, clearly defined groups sort themselves according to demographics, identity and ideology -- a troll would attempt to disrupt these groups, and order as normal. Trolls, as classically defined, could insert themselves into any number of milieus; the classic New York Times Magazine piece documenting the state of the troll in 2008 recorded instances like self-defined trolls hacking the Epilepsy Foundation's website in order to fill it with flashing lights, triggers for epileptics. As an action designed to harm and upset a specific group of people, it wasn't exactly a newspaper piece about salad.

Advertisement:

"It's one of those semi-useful but also dumb Internet words that just kind of means whatever you want it to mean," said Shani Hilton, an editor at BuzzFeed. "It's a good shorthand for a kind of thing that's been going on for a long time at more contrarian publications." Consider the case of Newsweek, the publication that got attention for splashy covers (like the one featuring a resurrected Princess Diana, aged 50, or the one calling Barack Obama "The First Gay President"). Those were frustrating -- so too was Newsweek's online arm the Daily Beast publishing a gallery of "magazine controversies" today after spending years trying to provoke. But whose existence or fixed ideas were they upending?

"People have come to use the word 'troll' to mean, 'It made me angry on the Internet,'" said Doyle. "And that's pretty broad. It's a big and noisy Internet."

During the rise of the troll, the Internet was less in the thrall of legacy media than it is today; legacy media outlets, by their very nature, broadcast to a wide audience rather than a narrow and self-selecting community. If the visually striking, provocative and attention-getting Rolling Stone cover is trolling, what, then, are the visually striking, provocative and attention-getting covers George Lois designed for Esquire in the mid-20th century? (Lois recently told New York magazine the cover should "maybe have a devil's tongue or horns. I'm not saying I would do that, but you better do something" -- such a visual frippery would, if the media outrage cycle behaved as normal, likely only further elicit calls of trolling.)

Advertisement: