Fergus Cassidy

Tooth is out

FOR a technical story to escape from the straitjacket of the technology sections, it needs a disguise. Even at that, most of them only make it to the feature sections. Rarely will one make it all the way to the news pages.

The few that do make it past the border patrols and on to pages two, three or four are usually stories where the technical aspect is incidental. Technical stories don't give good headlines unless, of course, there is sex involved.

'Biting into the new sex text craze' ran the BBC headline. 'Latest hi-tech sex craze' was the Reuters version. Best of all was the New York Post. Under the headline 'Sex Sickos Wireless Hookups' the story opened with: "The sleazy subculture of sex addicts has found a new way to use wireless technology to enable encounters with strangers".

These stories were about the same thing, the appearance in March 2004 of 'toothing'. The term referred to using a Bluetooth-enabled phone to find other similar devices within a short range of 30ft or so and then sending the word 'toothing?' as an initial greeting and code word.

By the time May arrived toothing was "a craze" and "a British phenomenon" and had also "spread around the internet like wildfire". Not just the internet.

BBC Radio 5 Live picked it up, along with Radio Air America, and a number of top-selling men's and women's magazines.

It helped that the term 'dogging' had surfaced courtesy of a soccer player in Britain and his off the ball incidents. 'Toothing' slotted in nicely as the technological equivalent. It also fed an insatiable appetite for technology as threat.

Well fear no more. From the beginning the story was a hoax. And it ended last week with a whimper when freelance writer Jim Hanas wondered what had happened to 'toothing'.

In response to Hanas' enquiries, the originators of the spoof told their story, saying that "the joke had started to wear thin".

Ste Curran and Simon Byron, who describe themselves as "collectively creative as we are frustratingly idle", had noticed how dogging, a "stupid sexual buzzword", had appeared out of nowhere and came up with the idea of 'toothing'.

"All we did was register a forum 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 roll it did as forums were set up by "real people" in Sweden, Denmark, Italy and Germany.

According to Curran, a few days later, the print media requests started arriving. "We kept a record at the start of where we were mentioned, but there were too many to record in full".

No surprise then that both originators were very busy with the whole affair and mention "burning the candle at both ends" to keep up.

Curran said he had to write Penthouse-letters-page style sexual adventure stories for a major British newspaper. "So many papers read that and followed up", he remarked. "Broadsheet and tabloid, regional, national, all over the planet". A German TV station agreed to "pixelate our faces and change our voices for a pre-recorded interview".

Sidekick Byron echoed Curran's views: "The media loved to believe there was this hideous underground movement of people having random sex. We toyed with the woman from More [magazine], only agreeing to speak to them if they ran toothing as a position of the fortnight".

Not that it's all over, Curran wrote what he calls "The (Abridged) Truth" and ended with a word to the wise. "Despite all the made-up ramblings on websites across the globe, despite the forums and the fan fiction, the tabloids and the broadsheets, the perverts and the simply curious, no one has ever ever, ever [his emphasis] toothed."

There was also an apology: "For those we fooled: we're sorry", he said. "There's definitely more to tell, but at another time".

As this prank only ended last week, it'll be interesting to see how that apology is met. Already disclaimers are appearing on some websites which ran the 'toothing' story last year.

Some have run the hoax revelation but others have pulled the original articles and made like it never happened. Amnesia is a handy bolt hole on the web, but ineffectual for print.

One British journalist admirably returned to the subject last week in his blog: "Guess I'll have to cough to that one?'toothing' never happened". Another who had written up the story, but voiced scepticism at the time, said he "guessed" something wasn't right.

Extraction may be painful but the discomfort should rightly be shared by those who linked to, commented on or helped prolong the 'toothing' decay.