Monday April 04, 2005

What Ever Happened to Toothing?

UPDATE: After this post, the supposed originator of “toothing”—and the primary source for all articles written about it—came out and admitted that it was all a hoax, designed to make the media look foolish. Which it did. More details in this post.

Remember ‘toothing’? It was a craze that was sweeping England last year as bored commuters arranged sexual encounters using Bluetooth-enabled cellphones. You probably read about it over at Wired or Reuters or the BBC. There’s a decent chance you even blogged about it.

Well. What happened?

It occured to me that a trend like that must have made it across the pond by now, but as I poked around, I found almost no active toothing info on the web, and the online sources cited in the Wired article are all gone or abandoned. The blog of Toothy Toothing, the primary source for both the Wired and the Reuters stories—the articles from which all others were derived—hasn’t been updated since shortly after the articles appeared. The forums that can be found are inhabited by people who read those articles and want to get in the game, but their questions go unanswered. “Toothers aren’t going away,” Wired assured us last year when reporting on the globalization of this “primarily British phenomenon,” but they seem to have done just that. Presuming, of course, that they ever existed in the first place.

While it would be ridiculous to suggest that no one anywhere has ever hooked up via Bluetooth—or any other technology—the evidence that they are doing so with the regularity that would constitute a phenomenon (“primarily British” or otherwise) is pretty slim. There hasn’t been a post to the Toothing Blog since a month after the Wired article appeared. The Beginners Guide to Toothing and Toothy Toothing’s forums, meanwhile, are both gone, and a relaunched board has logged less than 500 posts in the last year, the majority by people who have never toothed but would like to or who are trying to find out how to make their cellphones work. Many of the posts are dedicated to trying to arrange (apparently elusive) toothing encounters—which kind of defeats the point, since we already knew you could arrange sex that way—and a few raise suspicions that toothing is just a myth. Journalists looking for first-hand accounts are met with silence. Other forums devoted to the practice are similarly anemic, and a U.K. Yahoo! group no longer exists.

The only non-anonymous corroboration of anything like toothing that I could find appeared in India’s The Week, in an article about a software engineer who met two women for coffee via toothing. But’s that not really toothing, now is it? That’s just standard mobile networking like that proposed by MobiLuck, Serendipity and CrowdSurfer—none of which are exactly setting the world on fire. The Week is even wistful about the fact that toothing in India is so staid, compared to London, France and Belgium, where it has supposedly “assumed scary proportions.” Back in London, however, Guardian columnist Andrew Brown, writing shortly after the Wired article appeared, went looking for toothing and couldn’t find it anywhere. “I am more and more convinced that it’s a myth like flying saucers, in which technology comes to dramatise emotional longings,” he wrote. ” It is a myth about the benevolence of the world—the modern commuter’s equivalent of believing that a statue of the Virgin weeps for you.”

So was toothing a trend that didn’t catch on, a case of wishful thinking, or just a big hoax? I emailed Toothy Toothing himself last night and put the question to him. He has yet to respond.

(Note: In response to my email, the guys behind “Toothy Toothing” and the whole toothing scam explain how they hatched the hoax here and here.)

Posted by jim at 03:07 PM ||