Phil Gyford, in With great audiences…, wonders what it takes to get a story propagated in the weblog world, and is afraid that the answer is merely ‘attention grabbing headline + a patina of Old Media validity.’ He writes about a “banning blogging” story picked up from the traditional press, where the weblog…

Phil posts about BoingBoing, but the pattern is quite general — you can see misleading posts like San Francisco Attempts to Regulate Blogging almost daily on slashdot.

The pressure to give things a dramatic headline, online or off, is tremendous, because if you don’t get readers with the headline, you won’t get them at all. This leads, in the weblog world, to a curious moral hazard, where fact-checking can be left to the furthest upstream source. “Well, if the Osceola Star-Ledger, with their enormous resources, can’t fact-check the article, how can I be expected to???” And so we get ourselves in high dudgeon at injustices that may never have happened, because they are the kind of thing we would hate if they had happened.

Thiscontrasts with with the magnificent distributed fact-checking done elsewhere, as with the Trent Lott or Dan Rather investigations. The choice to fact-check vigorously, even when a story is reported by well-funded news outlets, seems only to happen when the writers in question disagree with the story, while the decision to accept the fact-checking of any traditional media outlet, in order to be able to fast-forward to the aforementioned high dudgeon, seems to come when the weblogger likes repeating or even amplifying the claims made further upstream.

Which brings me to ‘toothing.

‘Toothing was the craze for arranging on-the-spot trysts among users of Bluetooth-capable cellphones, as reported by Wired last March. Except ‘toothing was a hoax, as the perpetrator revealed after seeing this slashdot thread.

It seems harmless, except that many of the subsequent references weren’t about ‘toothing per se (understandable, as there was nothing to study), but rather referenced ‘toothing as one member of a set of activities mobile technologies enabled. ‘Toothing went from being a thing to being a touchstone for reasoning about mobile technologies generally.

A couple years ago, I spent some time on the trail of the urban legend that half the world had never made a phone call. While ‘toothing was never likely to acheive that degree of saturation, it was, like the ‘half the world’ phrase, a distortion not only in itself but as the avatar of larger social patterns.

I checked the M2M archives, and to my relief, we didn’t write about ‘toothing, though probably not out of any native skepticism, or we would have written to de-bunk it. Yoz Grahame is the only person I know of who got this right, in the voluptously titled Sex-Crazed Brits Just Doing It Everywhere, Like, Everywhere Man, You Can’t Stop Them, They’re Like Dogs In Heat Or Something, And Dude, I Gotta Get Me Some Of That:

One lesson we could all take from this is “Pay more attention to Yoz”, which couldn’t hurt, but a better motto is ‘WWYD?’ Note that he didn’t fact-check the ‘toothing story, he sense-checked it. The thing wrong with the toothing story isn’t that the participants of the toothign scene aren’t IDed, it’s that the story itself doesn’t make any sense. Most of us will not be able to afford the calling and re-calling of sources to double-check a quote, but all of us can ask ourselves, just before we hit Submit, ‘Is this true?’

And the time we should be most careful to do that is if we feel really satisfied with what we’ve written — “How dare the House of Representatives propose a mandatory bar code tattooed on the foreheads of liberal bloggers!!! Must. Denounce. Now.”

All the phrases we use to separate the weblog world from other media outlets weaken with elapsed time — old media, new media, traditional media, all of it suggests that newcomers join the club when they’ve been around long enough to be familiar. As weblogs continue their symbiosis with the forms of media that went before, we will make ourselves targets of truly malevolent hoaxes if we simply decide to repeat what we agree with. The echo chamber is of far less danger overall than unchecked amplification.