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It's A Small Net After All
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redirected from Main.ItsASmallNetAfterAll
alt title(s): Its A Small Net After All 
Even though the Internet has technically (kinda, sorta) existed since the 1960s, no one foresaw the impact it would have. And writers still seem to have trouble getting their heads around it.
One result is that it is totally absent from many shows set Twenty Minutes Into The Future.
Another is that TV shows never seem to really grasp just how big the Internet is.
One example of this is that Google comes off as a Magical Database: on the first try with a search engine, you will either get all the relevant documents and no irrelevant documents, or you will get a canonical response that the thing you're looking for does not exist on the Internet. Never has someone typed something in and gotten ten billion mostly irrelevant hits (well, almost never — see examples). And one false click never buries you in a quicksand pit of porn popups.
Another is that there is exactly one instant messaging service. And everyone is a subscriber. And everyone knows everyone else's handle. You can message anyone you want at any time without having to install new software, subscribe to a new service, or even search for their screen name.
And speaking of screen names, everyone gets something short, pithy, relevant, and unique. No one is ever "JAnderson789" or "buffyfan2001". Even if you want a short, really hip handle, it will be available as if it were reserved for you. And no one names themselves after characters from other TV shows. Also, everyone has exactly one online identity, which is their email address, instant messaging handle, their handle on every bulletin board, and the name they use on UseNet (caveat: UseNet never actually exists on TV, except for alt.nerd.obsessive). You'll never run into someone who uses the same handle as you on a different service (There is, after all, only the one service. In TV Land, AOL is, as they claim, the Internet). Email addresses rarely include a domain name.
Examples
Anime
- Azumanga Daioh plays a Double Subversion on this one. Late in the series, Sakaki types in a search engine "cats", a super-generic search term, and gets thousands and thousands of random matches; then she types "Iriomote cat", also a rather generic search term, and it looks like one of the very first matches is a news article about an Iriomote mountain cat that died after getting run over by a car, who also seems to be Mayaa's mother.
Film
- In the Russian movie Night Watch, the Night Watch's analyst uses a popular search engine's "search the future" functionality to search for "accidents in Moscow". The search returns exactly one result: a yet-to-happen plot-relevant plane crash, which the heroes then have to avert.
- Justified in that it is a magical extension of the database used by a race of wizards and shape-shifters who have already demonstrated genuine precognitive ability.
- The sequel Day Watch does avert this trope when dealing with computers. Big Bad Zavulon's MSN Messenger handle is "zavulon1@hotmail.com", with a number, and his username is "Z@vulon", with a symbol unusual for fictional usernames.
- The horror series Final Destination shows this trope in the sequels. In Final Destination 2, a character uses a generic search engine to search for "Flight 180," the doomed flight from the first film, and instantly finds what he's looking for. A bit justified, as it is established in the movie that the events of the first movie are well known in the movie world, though usually dismissed as an urban legend. A bit more egregious is a scene where a character finds directions to an insane asylum with a Google maps stand in without typing in her location.
- In the third movie, one of the characters says he did some searching on the Internet. The search isn't actually shown, probably due to the fact that the character wasn't actually looking up Flight 180, but rather "premonitions." It actually wouldn't be very surprising, given that the events of the first movie are so well known in the world of Final Destination, if there was a Wikipedia article on it, which Google would place up top of a "Flight 180" search.
- In the movie Mission Impossible, Ethan Hunt does an Internet search (which appears to be a Usenet search) for "Job," as in the Biblical character. This turns up nothing. He then modifies the search to "Book of Job," and finds what he was looking for. It would have been considerably more accurate and amusing if his first search, instead of turning up nothing, had come up with hundreds of thousands of listings submitted by employment agencies and resume services.
- The remake of Carrie subverts this. When Carrie does a search for "miracles" so that she could learn about her psychic powers, she has to dig through a bunch of results that have nothing to do with what she's looking for (including a site advertising "miracle underwear"). Still, she's able to find the information she needs without having to go to the second page.
- Early in the film Wanted (and also in one of its trailers
 ), James Mc Avoy's character Googles himself (without quotation marks!), and, in an illustration of how insignificant his life is, no results are returned. So apparently no pages on the in-film Internet contain either the words "Wesley" or "Gibson"...
- Note, however, that before the character in question takes a level in badass, his own daydreams insult him; for example, when he checks his bank balance at an ATM machine, the machine itself calls him a loser via its text display. The terribly demoralizing Google search could just be another instance of this.
Literature
- In one of the books based on the Purple Moon series, Mavis' Internet buddy that 'lives in Chicago' is actually one of her classmates. When she learns about this, she refuses to believe it.
- However, nobody's email address is short or interesting... but in The Nineties, they were supposed to be random words slightly connected to the character and accompanied by numbers.
- Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y had this as a minor plot point: When Ariel Manto bought the box full of books, the salesperson blogged about her. This posting is immediately indexed by a search engine and used by the antagonists to locate her. Also the amount of hits for the title of the book is strangely low and irrelevant links seem to be missing.
Comic Book
- When Spider-man revealed his identity as Peter Parker to the world, the ensuing amount of people googling "Peter Parker" brought down the entire Internet. Yes, even the porn sites.
- In Final Crisis it took Oracle a series of key strokes to shut down the Internet.
Live Action TV
- War of the Worlds: Kinkaid's handle is "Rogue". Other people on the network are "Lonelyheart" and "Ace". The Internet has a total population of about six. (To be fair, the Internet was a much smaller place in 1988.)
- So Weird: Fiona's handle is "Rockerbaby" (she's the daughter of two rock stars).
- Joan Of Arcadia: Luke's handle is "gravity_boy", a rare example of an underscore on TV.
- An early episode of Law And Order had detectives discovering the identity of a hacker because his screen name was "SlapShot" and the suspect was a NY Ranger's hockey fan. Apparently, only one hockey fan in all of Manhattan had a computer with Internet access. (No jokes about the actual number of hockey fans in Manhattan or in the American general public, please.)
- When (on The West Wing) Josh posted to lemonlyman.com, no one stopped to consider the possibility that anyone other than the real White House Deputy Chief of Staff would post under his name. Granted, the whole affair was based on what happened to Aaron Sorkin when he posted to the forums on Television Without Pity...
- This contrasts strongly with a Real Life incident where Babylon 5's Claudia Christian posted to a B5 discussion group, only to be chased off by the regulars as an allegedly clumsy and unconvincing impersonation!
- David Duchovny claimed the same thing happened to him in an X-Files chatroom.
- Max Barry claimed it happened to him in the Nation States chatroom.
- This happens Once A Week on the Colbert Report forums. General consensus is that either no-one is Stephen, or everyone is; one theory is that Stephen is amusing himself by trolling his own fans and pretending to be poor impersonations of himself. Given who we're talking about here, it's entirely possible.
- In the 90's, Phish's bassist Mike Gordon logged into a Phish chat room on AOL under the nick "FakeMike". People would ask him questions like, "If you are Mike, what are the chords to 'Bathtub Gin?'" or something but he had a mental block and couldn't think of any of the right answers.
- In CSI Miami, "Urban Hellraisers", the team is unable to get the details of the plot of a GTA-alike from its developer, and therefore has to resort to playing the game themselves to work out the storyline that a group of criminals is re-enacting. It seems that walkthrough sites don't exist on the CSI-universe Internet. Similarly, there's no such thing as a Save Point or Check Point, since they had to start the game over from the beginning every time they lost.
- A similar event happens in a Law And Order SVU episode, where two detectives — and later their captain — play a game enjoyed by a reclusive child who is also a murder suspect. Though, to be fair, they did seem to be playing it because they actually enjoyed the game.
- An episode of Arrested Development shows a Google search for "Sacremende" generating no results, not even a typo. Careful examination of the frame reveals an unprintable character inserted after the word to force this result.
- This editor was amused by an episode of CSI where the writers assumed that instant messaging automatically retained a log of user conversations. Also, how from a stored IM session they were able to pull up an IP address. Not necessarily impossible on either count... but definitely not as easy (especially for the latter) as it looked.
- Several IM clients automatically log all conversations, so the user can, for example, search for an URL he received from a buddy a few months ago instead of asking the buddy whether he still has the URL. (This Troper has used the history function in Trillian, ICQ (both Pro and Lite), Miranda and Pidgin/Gaim.)
- While in school this editor was told by a policewoman who came to talk to us that MSN, AIM, and most other IM services keep a log of all messages sent for several years after they were sent (at least) and give them to the authorites on request. Scary stuff, even if she was exaggerating (quite likely).
- The AIM one is accurate, at least. There was a scandal a while back where numerous AIM logs were leaked to the public by accident.
- In a hilariously ridiculous example from iCarly, Freddy, Carly and Sam look up "chicks" (as in baby chickens) on the Internet. Everyone watching probably knew that anyone searching for chicks on Google probably... wouldn't find baby chicken on the first page, let alone the first slot. Made even more hilarious by the fact the site they go to is called chicks.net, a giant website all about baby chicks.
- Reality Is Unrealistic here; Googling "chicks" does in fact give a website about chickens in the top three. And the actual Chicks.net has nothing to do with poultry or porn.
- For the curious, it's the personal website of Christopher Hicks.
- And they actually went on a site called Chickipedia, which is in reality the name of a wiki of hot women.
- And that's not even getting into the numbers of hits and comments (none of which seem to be "OMG U SUXORZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!") their webcast gets.
- How I Met Your Mother pushes this a bit, with websites and domain names set up with apparent ease. A timer-based countdown to a date isn't so implausible, even if the characters haven't mentioned any specific knowledge of how computers work, but setting up an online shop overnight seems a little bit dodgy.
- In an episode of Psych, known for eye-line matches to objects that glow when fake-psychic Shawn looks at them, Shawn deduces that the murder victim was secretly a well-known on-line comic book critic by noticing random, non-consecutive letters in the blogger's screen name.
- Parodied on Tim And Eric Awesome Show Great Job with "The Innernette," which is contained on one CD-ROM.
- Also parodied on The IT Crowd, where Roy and Moss convince Jen that the entire Internet is contained in a small black box that is usually kept atop Big Ben. They do this so that Jen will humiliate herself during a speech to the company shareholders, but are horrified when everyone at the meeting believes what she's saying is true...and then pleased again when the "Internet" is destroyed, and pandemonium breaks out.
Western Animation
Video Games
- The SNES version of Shadowrun pre-dates wireless networking, but apparently not Minesweeper, hence the maze-like minigames.
Web Original
- Played with by the SCP Foundation's SCP-335: The entire Internet on 150 floppy discs. How this fit on there is unknown, which is why the Foundation is interested in the discs in the first place.
Webcomics
- In the Sluggy Freelance mini-arc "Interweb with the Vampire" the fictional email/instant message service Grab-All plays this trope big time. Aside from Torg and Sam having the screen names "Torg" and "Sam," Grab-All's search engine is a little ... extensive.
Sam: Not just mail (...) you can keep your passwords, private documents, financial information, medical records, and skeletons-in-your-closet all in one handy location accessible from any online computer!
Real Life
- The standard fictional search engine used on British TV is Search-Wise.net, which you can visit, but can't actually use — this may be connected to the Five Five Five-equivalent in the British Postal And Telephone System.
- In Mexico, everybody uses MSN Hotmail, MSN Spaces, and MSN Messenger. AIM, ICQ and Jabber are almost unheard of, Gmail is pretty much reserved to computer geeks, and Myspace is usually used by amateur bands.
- Same thing in the Middle East, except replace "MSN Spaces" with Facebook, and Gmail is becoming fairly popular recently.
- 80% of all people between 16 and 40 in Iceland have a facebook account.
- Apparently 25% of people in South Korea have a Cyworld account.
- The British government is currently considering setting up a system that can monitor and record nearly all Internet activity in Britain. Whether they can actually pull this off or not remains to be seen.
Exceptions
Anime
- In the anime movie Ghost In The Shell and its TV sequel, Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, the net is much bigger and more complex than it is now. Intelligence-gathering via the Internet is the main job of team member Ishikawa, who rarely leaves his computer terminal. And even he comes up empty on occasion.
- There's also an amusing subversion of this trope in one specific episode of the TV series. An important witness has gone missing, and in order to find him, Section 9 pulls some political strings to get access to the American Empire's satellite net, which will let them search every single piece of electronic communication in Japan in real time. It works, and they find the guy, but then discover that the bad guys also had access to the satellite net, and so they know where the witness is, too. Explosions ensue.
- They also need to borrow/rent/steal full-use time on one of Japan's resident supercomputer clusters just to process the vast volume of data.
- Also, the strain of monitoring so much data literally caused many of Section 9's android Operators to crash, forcing Ishikawa to "borrow" processing power from other people's cyberbrains and running them in parallel.
- In one episode of Keroro Gunsou, Keroro tries to look up "Christmas" on the Internet, and ends up getting hundreds of thousands of hits, forcing him to limit his search a bit.
- In Puni Puni Poemi, the aliens access the Internet to learn about Earth, but all they find is pornography.
- Kyon in Suzumiya Haruhi is seriously worried about Haruhi wanting to post the highly erotic pictures of Mikuru on her website. Apparently he not only knows that the Internet is big, he also knows that the Internet is full of creepy people.
Film
- In the movie Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, Randal uses the fairly generic alias "Darth Randal".
- The movie Youve Got Mail actually correctly made use of AOL, from regular email, to the use of the IM ability. Oh, and the screen names of the lead characters were "Shopgirl" and "NY152".
- In the 2007 Transformers film, Sam Witwicky uses the login name "Ladiesman217" for his Ebay page.
Literature
- Enders Game does a surprisingly good job of portraying the modern "Net", considering its 1985 origins... if anything, it depicts the Internet as being more important and integrated into society than it is now.
- Particularly the depiction of the first two bloggers following the Messianic Archetype, a bit amusing to modern audiences.
- This troper didn't do more than raise an eyebrow at that, but found it jarring that the online communities were so insular: there are different types of access, the stuff students get being heavily restricted (with student's access, all you can do in a discussion outside your little bubble is be a Lurker), and the major political forums don't allow anyone to post except by invitation.
- So It's set in China, then?
- Cory Doctorow's Little Brother does a good job of portraying the 'net similarly to real life, complete with quickly popularized memes and handles like w1n5t0n. Of course, it is written by Cory Doctorow.
Live Action TV
- The new Doctor Who episode "Rose" features a subversion, where Rose types "Doctor" into a search engine (a fake one, designed specifically to be used in fiction), and gets a billion irrelevant hits.
Video Games
- Mega Man Battle Network: The Internet is so big that AI programs can run around it like it was its own world.
- However only the main characters seem to have actual personal pages, and they're all in the same area, while all other areas are nothing more than useless virus-filled mazes.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons; Smithers, looking for somebody to fill in as Mr. Burns' valet while he's on vacation, searches the employee database for "incompetent", and gets 713 results. He adds a long list of additional adjectives hoping to narrow down the search — and gets the same 713 results. At that point, he mutters, "Oh, I'll just get Homer Simpson."
- The South Park movie features Stan looking up "clitoris", and being rewarded with eight million results. (Which is actually more than the 5.23 million Google produces. "clit" is good for 5.92 million.) That said, the first one is still inadvertently relevant, seeing as it features Cartman's mother...
- It's South Park. She was probably on half of those pages.
- Also, on a whim, this troper just googled "clitoris", and now needs to change his pants.
- On Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends, Bloo is referred to once by his Internet tag "cardsharkmasterB22".
- When the Kim Possible villains Shego and Sr. Sr. Jr. searched for something really valuable and heavily guarded, Junior suggested that they would search the Internet for the words "really valuable" and "heavily guarded." It worked. For Ron, too.
- Searching Google for "Really Valuable" "Heavily guarded" returns that particular episode.
- As of right now, the first result is this page.
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