Thursday April 07, 2005

UPDATE: AN EXPERT WEIGHS IN on TOOTHING

Since Monday, when the guys behind toothing admitted it was a hoax, there have been some posts around suggesting that a) communication via short-range wireless is actually quite common in some locales, and b) whether or not it started as a hoax is irrelevant because now it is (or perhaps always was) a genuine phenomenon.

On the first point, yes, communication via Bluetooth is, of course, possible and apparently popular in some places. I discussed this in my very first post. (And, to the second point, I also noted there that somebody somewhere has probably lucked into sex via Bluetooth, but that does not a craze make.) I have no reason to doubt (although perhaps I should) the gentleman’s account from India’s The Week, for example, in which he describes how he has met women for coffee via Bluetooth. That’s fine, but it is not the “toothing” that Wired News and others reported on, which detailed the use of Bluetooth—by a lot of unnamed people—for arranging anonymous sex. Now, the meaning of the word “toothing” may morph to describe a broader category of communication, but that won’t make the original stories any less false or ridiculous. The irony of the The Week’s story is that the author seems to think—thanks to the hoax—that what’s going on in India is some adaptation of a method that is primarily used for sex in other places. Really, the guy in the article might be the pioneer here.

All of this is made clear by a few emails I’ve exchanged with Olivier Chouraki, founder of MobiLuck, a company that distributes social networking software for Bluetooth. Olivier tells me that communication via Bluetooth is, as this Boing Boing reader says, particularly popular with young people in the Middle East. However—and this addresses the second issue of whether “toothing” is now a craze—Olivier says he has “never heard of any ‘sexual encounter with a stranger,’ that could be credited to Toothing.” And Olivier, who says MobiLuck currently has 500,000 users worldwide, is extremely optimistic about the possibilities of short-range wireless communication. Meanwhile, the message “Toothing?”—the pickup line suggested by Toothy Toothing et. al.—is sort of like the Holy Grail for short-range wireless users. “Toothing is like making love with 2 women (or 2 men),” Olivier says. “A lot of
fantasies, a lot of writings, very few actually doing it. It certainly happens but it’s not a craze.” And while Mobiluck team members have met other users via the software, he says he has “never heard of one making love with a stranger in the tube!”

So could reporters have slipped the noose of the hoax, or were its perpetrators just too savvy? I asked Olivier if he could have set a reporter straight at the time. “I would not have been able to say it was nonsense,” he says, “but we were skeptical.” Exactly.

BONUS LINKS

• The Independent’s Charles Arthur licks his wounds after being taken in by toothing, while The Guardian’s Andrew Brown—who suggested toothing was a myth a year ago—resists gloating.


• At least this erotica writer managed to parlay the hoax into a published short story called “Toothin’ It.” Available at Amazon!