"Well plain ol' Danny, there are a lot of email-fish out there in the Email Sea. And while most of them are those nasty bottom-feeders with a suckhole mouth, there are a few that break the glimmering surface of the water, to glisten in the sunset for a few fleeting moments, like some kind of glorious e-marlin."
—Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email #122 "dreamail"
When imagining what the Internet might look like if one were to be sucked inside a computer, a big sprawling ocean is one of the more intuitive possibilities. After all, we already use a lot of language related to the sea to describe using the web: surfing, navigating, the surface web and The Deep Web, piracy... So, it seems logical to take advantage of that imagery when going for a physical representation of the Internet.
Sub-Trope of Cyberspace. Compare The Sky Is an Ocean, Space Is an Ocean and Sand Is Water.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Ken Akamatsu has a way of depicting the Internet as an endless ocean. Tuna is a DOS attack.
- A.I. Love You: Cyberspace is depicted as an ocean filled with fish who represent programs. The fish species depends on the nature of the program. It's also stated that there are as many different cyberspace oceans as there are digital networks.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi's chapter 154, where Chisame enters cyberspace to fight Chachamaru, and it is represented as an ocean with fish as programs.
- Dennou Boukenki Webdiver: Implied, with the term Web Divers, who upload their consciousness into a shared network; a cyber park called Magical Gate; to play with one another. The opening animation does feature the protagonist literally diving into a sea to symbolize this.
- Digimon Universe: App Monsters: While the Net Ocean has always been a location in the wider Digimon multiverse, it's most prominent in App Monsters, where it makes up the vast majority of the Internet. The Big Bad is even called Leviathan, after the Biblical sea serpent, and it lurks in the Dark Web in the depths of Net Ocean.
- Ghost in the Shell: The process for searching the internet for specific information is called "Net diving".
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex:
- The net itself is usually depicted as an empty void filled with information nodules, but Motoko's Chroma avatar's clothing floats around as if being dragged by water when she dives into network rooms.
- The first season's ending theme song "Lithium Flower" contextually refers to how amazing Motoko is at "surfing", a reference to her being a Super-Class-A hacker.
- Another song on the show's soundtrack, "Where Does This Ocean Go?" also poetically compares the internet to an ocean (while also talking about the mundane lives of random people as they interact in the real world).
- Ghost in the Shell: Arise:' Motoko performs a brain dive (basically she's hosting a private chatroom) which depicts her as a mermaid underwater.
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex:
- Real Drive: The internet is known as the Metal, and its inner workings function a lot like an ocean. After waking up from a 50 year coma, former professional diver Masamichi Haru soon finds that his diving expertise will serve him well as a "virtual diver" to search the Metal.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS: VRAINS (standing for Virtual Reality Artificial Intelligence Network System) is occasionally hit with "Data Storms", which usually manifest as gales or tornados. However, when they are particularly powerful, they manifest as tsunami waves. In addition, the digital city within VRAINS has a sewer system to recycle data, and that data behaves a lot like water — in fact, there are digital creatures swimming in there.
Film — Animation
- Old Master Q Incredible Pet Detective has the titular character, as well as Mr Chou and Big Potato and other characters. The first two get sucked into cyberspace with a dog, swimming in a literal Digital Sea, and the three end up looking like Neo, a T-800 and Darth Vader.
Live-Action TV
- Adam Ruins Everything: "Adam Ruins the Internet" depicts it this way. Adam takes his subject on a rowboat into a cyberspace ocean and literally "fishes" for people's information.
Music
- "Weird Al" Yankovic: "It's All About the Pentiums": There's a line where an Internet modem is metaphorically a surfboard, which is waxed, connecting the idea of the Internet to an ocean:
You're waxing your modem, tryin' to make it go faster.
Tabletop Games
- The Matrix in Shadowrun is near constantly described as a sea or ocean. To the point that "Data Trails", 5th edition's Matrix specific sourcebook, opens with a short story about a pair of hackers infiltrating a server with an ocean theme. Also Played for Laughs by having Danielle de la Mar use it as a flowery metaphor.
"The grids are a great placid sea where the agents of GOD monitor every ripple created by unauthorized activity. A poetic expression, but the best way to describe the current environment without delving into several terabytes of technical data."
Video Games
- The Boxxy Quest series takes place in a Cyberspace of the internet, which has seas separating landmasses:
- BoxxyQuest: The Shifted Spires: A fisherman in the port of Twitter, mentions that there are 32 seas.
- BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm: Referenced in multiple ways:
- Ships sail on "inter-server" waters between sites to take people between them. When on the ship, a Sailor says:
The Internet has two main oceans.Right now, we're sailing through the Twitter Sea.The Facebook Sea is far to the north. It's much colder and icebergs make for difficult passage.
- Cornelia's ultimate attack, is "Digital Sea". A tidal wave that sweeps the field and hits all enemies.
- Ships sail on "inter-server" waters between sites to take people between them. When on the ship, a Sailor says:
- In Fate/EXTRA, the dungeons within SE.RA.PH.'s cyberspace are depicted as an enormous ocean, with the actual traversable part being a transparent structure that offers a clear view of the seas beyond, complete with sunken structures and fish. Many of the enemy programs are also styled after fish.
- Shanghai.EXE: Genso Network: The Data Sea, a torrent of countless data whose raging currents will tear most Navis to bits, which is literally underlying the digital networks that Navis walk upon.
- Open Sorcery Sea Plus Plus: The game involves the intersection of magic, technology, and metaphor. The "sea" is navigated by Webship, which references the idea of the digital sea.
Webcomics
- xkcd has a (somewhat outdated: It's from mid-2010) "Map of the Internet" depicting it as an archipelago in this strip
. The previous one from early 2007 also depicts as islands.
Western Animation
- Code Lyoko has the Digital Sea, which is how the Lyoko program portrays the Internet. The heroes use a submarine-like vehicle to travel through it. It cannot be swam in, though, since anything that falls into the water has its data scattered and it's nearly impossible to get it back.
- ReBoot: Played with in the forms of the Saucy Mare and Ray Tracer. The former is a(n ex)pirate ship run by the Crimson Binome, Captain Capacitor which sails across the Net trading with different systems. Equipped with the remains of Web Creatures as armor, the ship can also sail into the Web itself, which is portrayed as a much more intense maelstrom. Ray is a search engine that takes the form of a sprite on a surfboard who literally "surfs the web" while looking for interesting sights.
Real Life
- While piracy itself doesn't necessarily imply an oceanic metaphor, euphemisms by the general populace, such as "raising the black flag" to describe it, do.
- The infamous file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay, takes the ocean metaphor to its logical conclusion. The even more infamous 4chan instead describes the Internet as an "ocean of piss".
- There are rumors circulating the web about a "Mariana Web", named after the world's deepest trench, that is supposedly the darkest and deepest part of the Dark Web itself, said to contain unimaginably vile content. As with many urban legends however, there's little (if any) evidence of such a thing.
- Trolling reputedly takes its name from the fishing practice in which a baited line is dragged behind the boat to catch any fish willing to bite.
- Similarly, "phishing" was named as an analogy to, well, fishing: the scammer sends a fake email as bait, hoping someone from the sea of internet users will bite and respond with their password or financial information.
