If toothing is a hoax
April 05, 2005
CLONMEL -- If toothing is a hoax, how do I categorise the animated invitation I received in a late night Berlin night club? The third frame of the animation invited me to the toilets. The animation came to my Nokia 9500 over Bluetooth while I was finishing my second glass of Pilsener. Either I misinterpreted the animation or there's a toothing subculture in late night Berlin. That might surprise Ste Curran who claims he fabricated the whole Toothing craze.
Wired, Reuters and the BBC picked up on the story--all the more remarkable because you're normally hard-pressed to pick up a Bluetooth signal on most Irish transporation nodes. I find no more than six a week, traveling more than 350 miles on Irish public transport every week. I suspect that anecdotal evidence holds in England as well.
From the hoaxster's explanation:
All we did was register a forum (which has now been taken down by the service provider, but we have a backup) and fill it with fictional posts by fictional Toothing ’sceners. A week later, we had what appeared to be a vibrant UK Toothing community all ready to roll, and I sent the link off to Gizmodo, a gadget blog. They reported it (you can see that first story here, with a credit at the end to ‘S’, my super-subtle pseudonym). Everyone else linked to / blogged / ripped off their story. Things started to roll, and we became a ludicrous, implausible meme. In turn, that brought Real People to our forum. Others created forums for their localities - Sweden, Denmark, Italy, whatever.
Toothing Blog (defunct) and the new Toothing Forum.
David Pescovitz -- "Toothing was a hoax"
Jim Hanas -- "The truth about toothing"
TriForce -- "Toothing: the abridged truth" for Irishblogs
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