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{{trope}}
{{quote|
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 for a long time it
Another is that, even now, 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 ones, 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
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, the underground identity by which they're known in the illegal hacking community, and the name they use on
{{examples|Examples:}}▼
After more than two decades of the Internet being part of modern society, this trope is slowly becoming [[Discredited Trope|discredited]] -- but it is not going easily, or willingly. The fantasy Net of this trope is entirely too handy and too easy for hack writers to give it up until even [[Executive Meddling|network executives start saying, "that's ''wrong''."]]
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[
** Note that the Iriomote cat is a very endangered (due to the erosion of his habitat) species found only in Japan (and very beloved by the japanese as one of their last wild animals) with a population of under 100. A news item about such a rare animal {{spoiler|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 ''[[
** Saten doesn't just google the term, but writes in on the search bar of some web forum focusing around urban legends and conspiracy theories. Those would be less likely to show outright porn on the subject matter.
* ''[[Midori Days]]'' has, in one chapter, Seiji trying to learn how to use the internet with Midori's help. So they try a search engine. [[All Men Are Perverts|Seiji tries looking for porn right away]]. Later, Midori decides to look up her own name, and is surprised when she finds a search result. Try Googling your first name. You'll find a result, almost guaranteed.
** Though it does become justified in their surprise when that website is [[Stalker
*** In fact there were a huge amount of hits, which makes sense since "midori" is Japanese for "green" and she says as much, they only clicked that one because it said net idol Midori.
* Subverted in ''[[Puni Puni Poemi]]''. Aliens trying use the internet to learn about humanity find nothing but porn. And they're completely fascinated by it too. But given aliens [[Anal Probing|normal activities]] that's not too surprising.
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== Comic Books ==
* 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. That was the [[Crowning Moment of Funny]] for all of ''[[Civil War (Comic Book)|Civil War]]''. It was also the only amusing part of the event.
* In ''[[Final Crisis]]'' it took Oracle a series of key strokes to shut down the Internet.
** [[Sonichu|"Get away from that internet!]] [[Memetic Mutation|She's cuttin' it down!"]]
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* 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 scene where a character finds directions to an insane asylum with a Google maps stand in ''without typing in her location'' might appear egregious unless the location is all cookied up.
*** First hit on Google for 'Flight 180' is a link to the Final Destination Wiki, so even in the real world it works.
** 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 (
* 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/jun/20/wantedforcrimesagainstcine 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 [[Self
** Note, however, that before the character in question [[Took a Level
* Averted in ''[[Catwoman (
* 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.
* In the movie [[
== 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]], [[Cyclic Trope|they were supposed to be]] random words slightly connected to the character and accompanied by numbers.
* Scarlett Thomas's ''[[
* The first example is subverted in ''[[Twilight (
* Averted in ''Always Coming Home'', a '''''1985''''' novel by [[Ursula K. Le Guin]]. It already predicts the difficulties of searching a planet (and beyond) wide database.
* The [[MacGuffin]] in ''Count Zero'', the conclusion of [[William Gibson]]'s ''[[Sprawl Trilogy]]'', is an "Aleph": a portable gray box containing a duplicate of the entire contents of [[Cyberspace]].
* In ''[[Ender's Game]]'', Peter Wiggin eventually becomes the {{spoiler|supreme ruler of humanity}}, because of his ... political blogging skills.
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== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[War of the Worlds (TV series)|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
* 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 [http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com Television Without Pity]...
** This contrasts strongly with a [[Real Life]] incident where ''[[
*** David Duchovny claimed the same thing happened to him in an ''[[The X
*** Max Barry claimed it happened to him in the [[
*** This happens [[Once an Episode|Once A Week]] on the ''[[The Colbert Report|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. [[Alter Ego Acting|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.
* An episode of ''[[CSI: Miami]]'', "Urban Hellraisers", had a rare example of this that ''inconveniences'' the characters: the team is unable to get the details of the plot of a [[Fictional Counterpart|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, [[Pac
** A similar event happens in a ''[[Law and Order SVU]]'' episode, where two
*** Further justified because they wanted to be able to bond with the suspect through the one thing that they knew he had an emotional connection to (the boy was mildly retarded, and was a suspect because he attempted to use a spell from the game on the victim (he was actually trying to ressurect her)) and walkthrough info would not neccessarily given that to them.
* An episode of ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|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.
** Somewhat justified in that searching for Sacremende even now only brings up pages related to ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|Arrested Development]]'', and that episode was done before Google really started their "did you mean" function at the top of bad searches.
* In a hilariously ridiculous example from ''[[
** [[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.
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*** Granted that in the [[TV Movie]] ''iGo to Japan'', the plot is that there are entered for {{spoiler|and eventually win}} an award for "Best Webshow", so an unusually large number of hits or comments may be justified.
* ''[[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.
** There are quite a few websites that let you do just that, Cafepress for one, and with basic knowledge of their API you can indeed set up something half decent overnight.
** There are also open-source web frameworks, such as Magento and Drupal/Ubercart, to let you create an online store in an hour.
** You can buy a domain name from any number of companies using a credit card, and have it pointing at a website within just a few hours (the time-delay due to the machinations of the internet Domain Name System). Assuming your ISP updates its records in a timely fashion.
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** In another episode, Gus recognizes a missing poker player's screen name from an online poker site because he too plays online poker. Apparently there is only one online poker site in existence, and it's small enough that someone would recognize the name of another random player.
** In ''another'' episode, Gus Googles the name of a park and gets zero results. Shawn suggests he adds "ing", and they get info on a parking lot with that name.
* Parodied on ''[[Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!]]'' with "The Innernette," which is contained on one CD-ROM. Marketed as a safer alternative to the real Internet, since your computer isn't actually connected to anything. It includes an "online retailer" that requires a fax machine and a "chat room" with some exreemely dense AI's.
* Also parodied on ''[[
* ''[[Defying Gravity]]'' One of the astronauts explains how they've fit hundreds of movies and [[YouTube]] into their computer's databank. Yes, all of You Tube.
** When it comes to "all of YouTube" the burning question isn't so much how, it's ''why''... all the fanvids? Guitar Hero playthroughs? 2G1C "reaction shots"?
* Averted a couple of times on ''[[
{{quote|
** Played straight in the first-season episode "I Robot, You Jane" when Buffy consults a computer geek who informs her that anytime you have an e-mail address to start from, "you can pull up someone's profile based on their user name." Although this may have been slightly more likely to be true in 1997 than it is today.
*** And actually more likely now, thanks to all the facebooks and stuff. Using e-mail instead of username also appears to be gaining on popularity (with or without another screen name). The Internet changes quickly.
* "Rose", the first episode of the ''[[
** In the same season, a Dalek, in the span of about two minutes at most, downloads the entire internet through a single [[Computer Equals Monitor|computer monitor]] it just smashed its plunger into. Equally implausibly, it drains power from the entire West Coast of the United States through that same broken monitor.
* ''[[Torchwood]]'' already features a ''lot'' of [[Hollywood Hacking]], but notably has one very silly example in the middle of an otherwise extremely serious and tense encounter with a demon:
{{quote|
* Averted on ''[[Desperate Housewives]]'', where a suspicious Edie has difficulty finding any information on the season's [[Big Bad]] due to him having the very generic name Dave Williams.
* Averted in the ''Bag of Bones'' miniseries when Mike Noonan does a search for "dark score crazy" and returns at least one page of irrelevant results.
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== Newspaper Comics ==
* Parodied in ''[[
== Video Games ==
* The SNES version of ''[[Shadowrun]]'' pre-dates wireless networking, but apparently not ''[[Minesweeper]]'', hence the maze-like minigames.
* Averted in ''[[Chaos
* The hyper-futuristic setting of ''[[Ripper]]'' features a network of hyper-advanced virtual reality wells...consisting of about a dozen possible places where you can go, including a public library, and half of them are personal storage wells.
* In ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'', you can receive email from people you helped, in that game or [[Mass Effect 1|the first one]]. You can also get spam.
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== Web Comics ==
* In the ''[[
{{quote|
* Played straight, but mockingly, in ''[[Questionable Content]]''.
{{quote|
'''Faye''': What, you're just gonna google "crazy chick on a vespa" and see what comes up?
'''Marten''': The internet knows everything. It's like Kim Peek only rude and [[The Internet Is for Porn|obsessed with pornography]]. }}
** Hannelore finds and downloads ''all'' the cute animal pictures on the Internet. By hand, in just a few days, and onto a single computer, [http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1290 from the sound of it.] The bounty from [https://web.archive.org/web/20131101163205/http://cuteoverload.com/ Cute Overload] alone would probably fill up her hard drive...
== Web Original ==
* Played with by the [[
** It's zipped, duh.
** It mentions in the SCP file that the disks have an infinite amount of available storage space and that they can automatically update their contents whenever the actual site changes.
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== Western Animation ==
* Parodied on ''[[Minoriteam]]'', when the [[Big Bad]] attempts to discover the heroes' secret identities by simply typing "Secret Identities" into an Internet search engine. It would have worked, if not for [[Explosive Overclocking]]. (An actual Google search for "secret identities" returns the Wikipedia article on the concept, which links to a ridiculously complete list of DC Comics secret identities, as its first result. Other results are links to less complete lists from other universes.)
* Subverted by the ''[[
* Parodied in an episode of ''[[
{{quote|
** Also averted in the episode where they enter the internet in VR, and it's a huge, sprawling [[Wretched Hive]] of [[The Internet Is for Porn|porn]] and [[
* Hit by ''[[The Venture Bros]]'' in the season three episode "ORB", when trying to decipher a riddle written about a century ago. Pete White, computer expert and probably half-Author Avatar, just googles the clues, quickly determining that "Minuit's Bargain" is New York City. After commenting on how the poor chump who came up with the riddle never would've expected them to have the Internet, he proceeds to derail the plan by searching for "The house that Coke built" and somehow coming up with Studio 54.
** The Alchemist, who comes up with the right answer in that episode, already believes the Internet has few purposes, or at least few good ones. "I don't want to play ''[[World of Warcraft]]''! Get me a ''real'' dictionary!"
*** With his [[Genre Savvy]], the Alchemist guessed correctly that a man writing a riddle 100 years ago wouldn't have used current pop references, thus the uselessness of the internet which flooded Pete White with cocaine (and probably Coca-Cola) references. Al knew that the riddle would refer to Coke as the residue of steel preparation, a definition only Wikipedia would hold, at best. (Venture Brothers is a [[Crapsack World]] after all)
* When the ''[[Kim Possible]]'' villains [[Dark Action Girl|Shego]] and [[Minion
** Searching Google for "really valuable" and "heavily guarded" returns that particular episode. Apparently, fans have looked those terms up so many times, it's at the top of the list of suggested searches if you type in so much as "really va".
* In one [[Darker and Edgier|"Red Sky"]] episode of the [[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987
== Real Life ==
* The standard fictional search engine used on British TV is [
* 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 (Facebook is gaining popularity too).
** Same thing in the Middle East, except replace "MSN Spaces" with Facebook, and Gmail is becoming fairly popular recently.
*** That's not true about Iran (which is non-Arab country by the way). The prevalent IM software in Iran is Yahoo! Messenger, and Gmail is very popular too.
*** 80% of all people between 16 and 40 in Iceland have a Facebook account.
*** [
** In Greece it's almost the same, with everyone using MSN, Hotmail and Facebook. It used to be hi5, but apparently not anymore.
** MSN is equally dominant in Malaysia. In second place (and lagging far, ''far'' behind) is Yahoo! Mail. It's rare to find people who use other services (hell, most of the population doesn't even know AOL or Jabber exists).
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** In Russia everyone except rebellious geeks uses ICQ. Even though various Jabber flavors like Gmail are growing popular, ICQ is still the default way of doing IM.
** Brazilians love MSN (in no small part due to the fact that many people bought their first computers after Windows XP - which shipped with MSN Messenger - came out) and Orkut, and are discovering love for Facebook.
* Take any case of someone famous, usually someone older and [[The New Rock and Roll|slightly befuddled by new media and particularly social networking]], who is shocked, shocked! to find that people can and will impersonate them on sites like [[Twitter]] and [[
** ''[[Wiretap]]'': Jonathan Goldstein told a story about how, when he signed up for Twitter, he eventually found that someone else was claiming to be him... and because the impostor's account was more interesting, he had more followers than the real Jonathan Goldstein.
** [[Margaret Atwood]] joined Twitter and discovered that there were already two people on Twitter pretending to be her. As she put it, "This grew; I gave commands; then [[Never Mess
** ''[[The Social Network]]'' star [
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Truth in Television]]
[[Category:Its A Small Net After All]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Technology Tropes]]
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