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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 
I want to download the Internet. Do I need a bigger hard disk?
Even though the Internet has technically (kinda, sorta) existed since the 1960s, not everyone 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.
- Note that the Iriomote cat is a very endangered species found only in Japan with a population of under 100. A news item about such a rare animal being killed by a car would likely rank highly in most search engines as a very popular news story.
- Played straight in episode 4 of To Aru Kagaku No Railgun, where some characters look up the urban legend of "The Undressing Woman" on the internet. Immediately they found several websites dedicated to the myth, but there's no mention of any other sites. Sure, adding "urban legend" to the search criteria might help, but searching for "undressing woman" is still gonna link you to a lot of porn.
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.
- An odd aversion, that. "Zavulon" seems like one name that wouldn't already be taken.
- 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 McAvoy'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.
- Averted in Catwoman, of all places. When Halle Berry looks up "cats" on Google, she gets a ton of irrelevant hits of little old ladies dressing their pet cats in ridiculous costumes. She then tries the more specific search "cat worship"; although this does cue a creepy plot-relevant montage of cat cults throughout history, the images she gets are believably of the sort you'd expect to get if you tried to search that on Google.
- Averted in Scary Movie 3. When Cindy is searching the internet for information on a plot-relevant location, the audience sees her face express fear and horror as a creepy melody plays in the background. Naturally everyone assumes she has found the information... until the camera shows the screen, revealing that her "horror" comes from the fact that popups are spawning faster than she can click them away.
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
Western Animation
Video Games
- The SNES version of Shadowrun pre-dates wireless networking, but apparently not Minesweeper, hence the maze-like minigames.
- Averted in Chaos Head when Takumi tries looking up NOZOMI and reasonably enough gets tons of useless results since, for all he knows, it could merely be the nurse's first name.
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.
- This troper is one of the few people in Brazil that doesn't use Orkut all the time (for personal dislike of it). MSN is also used by almost everyone, as is Gmail.
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