Charles on… anything that comes along

The Register follows up the revelations (hinted at much earlier - a year earlier in fact - in Andrew’s column) that “toothing” (as in using your mobile’s Bluetooth facility to trawl for s-e-x) was a fake. All got up. Just someone who thought of a fun troll, created a message board, put up some postings, and went with it.

Ah me. I thought it was a fun story, and did eventually write it up (I know someone who sold it on to the Daily Star..) in my column in The Independent. Ho hum. Well, it was a well-done spoof. And how exactly was one to establish that it really happened? Happened/didn’t happen, it was one of those “no simple solution” problems.

At the time, “dogging” was all the rage, so to speak. I’ll bet Stan Collymore would be devastated if that turns out to be all made up too. (For all I know - forgive my sheltered life - dogging is completely fictional too. I’ve read one feature in a womens’ mag about it, and I didn’t believe a word of their ‘real-life’ case studies.)

Update: read how a hoax was born here:

the concept of Toothing - beaming a sexual text message to a random phone on a commuter-packed tube train - is a bit like going into a crowded nightclub, throwing a brick at the dancefloor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will agree to sleep with you. It’s technically possible, and it’s not going to happen. That made it even better when the whole world fell for it.

Oh, and a comment from the Slashdot discussion (which starts out believing it’s true then swerves midway when the truth - tooth? - is revealed: It was too hard for the average user. Perhaps if Apple built it into the iPod and integrated it with the scroll wheel it would reach critical mass.

Even more updated: when you read the Triforce Blog (written by the guys who did it), you realise that when a hoax gets hold (and this was a particularly good one), it really goes. What’s most interesting is how it then gains a life of its own. From this post:

To add to the list of media appearances - which I’ll dig out later - I was interviewed on Radio Air America in addition to Radio 5 Live. Plus, The Guardian - which apparently likes to think it was in on the joke now - wrote about us twice in one week, even providing an accompanying cartoon. We toyed with the woman from More, only agreeing to speak to them if they ran Toothing as a position of the fortnight. We hilariously got one idiotic journalist in a pub, by illustrating Toothing going on around him. He didn’t see the two of us changing phone names and beaming disgusting gay messages at each other. Maybe you believe what you want to believe. Other highlights included B Magazine (I think) running a feature claiming they’d done it. They hadn’t. And a concerned Toother had her guilt dissected in The Mirror’s

In the light of all those (I mean, a problem page making up a story? A women’s mag making up a real-life feature?) I’m beginning to feel like I wasn’t particularly crap, inasmuch as I did speak to those I could find, and tried to be a bit sceptical. But then, if you’d told me people arranged to meet each other in car parks in groups for anonymous sex, I’d have said ‘Eh??’ Or that ageing Eastenders characters could use a webcam to.. no, let’s not go there.

It’s absolutely the same thing as the Leeds Uni students art hoax when they pretended to have used their art grant money to go on holiday to Spain - cue outraged stories in papers - and the “Cornwall surf rage” thing. Once these tales get enough momentum, news desks (or features queens) start pushing hacks to get the story, no matter what doubts surface. Though in fairness to the Indie’s newsdesk, they absolutely didn’t go for toothing - though nobody ever said they doubted it; the impression was that it was just too seedy.

Update again (finally?): ah, a Hall of Shame, which includes ..ah well. How horrible those windows look.

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