Tuesday April 05, 2005

UPDATE: The Best of Toothing Journalism

Now that “toothing” has been revealed to be a hoax, all the stories written about it make for particularly entertaining reading, as they report on legions of non-existent “toothers” and tell of governmental efforts to control the phantom practice. There are plenty of examples to choose from, but here are some of my favorites.

India’s The Week reported on a supposed government crackdown on the pan-European epidemic:

Toothing in places like London, France and Belgium has assumed scary proportions and the governments have reportedly banned toothing discussion boards.

Wired News told of its rapid spread and went inside the mind of a hypothetical “toother”:

Until now, toothing has been mostly a British phenomenon. But Jon recently added a new international toothing category to his forum. And quickly, several people began posting, looking to see if anyone in Mexico, the Czech Republic and elsewhere was into toothing. Either way, toothers aren’t going away. They ride their trains to and from work each day, hoping to find a little excitement amid the drudgery.

BBC News consulted a psychologist, who compared it to the apparently common British practice of calling people randomly on the telephone:

Psychologist Linda Blair, from the University of Bath, says the practice of Toothing is down to the human need to take risks. “I think we protect ourselves too much in modern society, and risk is a human need. We need motivation,” she said. “In some ways this is a tame way of picking people up, it’s almost a natural follow up from randomly picking people’s names out of the phone book.”

Reuters, meanwhile, tried to nail down some solid numbers:

Jon, who’s in his 20s and works in finance, estimates there could be tens of thousands of toothers from all sorts of professions and lifestyles. Certainly the Web site’s message board is busy.

And the New York Post, as only the Post can, found in toothing a sign of the apocalypse, sounding at once wizened and appalled. Here’s its lede under the headline “Sex Sicko’s Wireless ‘Hookups’”:

The sleazy subculture of sex addicts has found a new way to use wireless technology to enable anonymous encounters with strangers. “Toothing”—which has been linking European strangers for years—is now making its way to the United States, and Americans armed with PDAs and cellphones are starting to embrace the craze.

At least somone will be relieved it was a hoax.

Posted by jim at 11:45 PM ||