distributed knowledge while instant messaging

My friend Keith and I were just talking at Interzone, and he mentioned my previous post on distributed knowledge, and he brought up how when we use instant message clients (e.g., AIM), when someone else mentions something that we don’t know about, we often google it instead of admitting we don’t know. For example, if someone mentions a movie I’ve never heard of, I usually go to IMDB and research it so that I have the background knowledge to talk about it as well, even if I admit I haven’t seen it (and even if I admit that I have never heard of it). The internet is a tool that is part of our knowledge base.