It's a Small Net After All: Difference between revisions

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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.

** 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 ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''.

** 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.

** 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:

* 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.

== Web Comics ==

* In the ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'' mini-arc "[http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=090110&mode=weekly 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.

* Played straight, but mockingly, in ''[[Questionable Content]]''.

'''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 [http://cuteoverload.com/ Cute Overload] alone would probably fill up her hard drive...

* Subverted by the ''[[PvP]]'' animated series when first page of search engine results for "sky" are (as they had hoped) sites about naked women skydiving.

* Parodied in an episode of ''[[Futurama]]'':

** 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 [[Sturgeon's Law|mediocrity]]. Although kind of played straight in there being apparently only two sex chat rooms...

* 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.