Toothing and bluetoothing: network-fantasy-reality.

The highly publicised ‘Toothing hoax’ involved strangers having sexual encounters on the London tube by enabling their Bluetooth devices. Current Bluetooth scans in London reveal that people create innovative and sexually explicit nicknames for their devices. Users project an image of themselves into a social network - not thinking that this will result to an actual real sexual encounter, but they wish it would. The very wishing creates the fantasy, never to be realised. This paper explores how the fantasy of the existence of a localised virtual network as a social plane for sexual interactions, exited peoples’ imagination.