I've worked on problems that are famously profound (cancer research!) and problems that people think are stupid, trivial, and ephemeral. I've also worked for big, famous institutions, and I've worked for tiny companies.
And I caution everyone not to fall into the mental trap of overvaluing mass at the expense of momentum. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, it looked kind of silly. And, actually, it has looked kind of silly ever since. But make no mistake: The invention of the web is probably a more important human advance than anything else that has happened in the last twenty years. It has probably already saved more years of human life than the last twenty years of cancer research, for example.
A lot of the problems that people think are important and profound are intractable. Intractable problems don't go away, because they don't get solved. They are around for the long haul. There's time to build institutions around them, to build popular awareness of them, to get really good at marketing them. When someone claims to be working on a Very Important Intractable Problem everyone knows they are Smart.
Whereas many world-changing practical inventions are never profound. They are always either silly or boring. They start off silly. When you first invent the mobile radio people laugh at you, because you are a ham radio geek and you carry around some big ugly boxes in a van. Then mobile radios become frivolous things carried only by the CEOs in the movie Wall Street. Then they become frivolous things carried only by hipsters. Then they become frivolous things carried only by salarymen. Then they become frivolous things carried by the young. And then... they become ubiquitous, no big deal, boring. In a handful of decades we are going to equip everyone in the world with a goddamn tricorder and society is barely going to consciously notice.
That is a technology with momentum. Yeah, nobody takes mobiles seriously. They're disposable, and they never work as well as you think they should, and they're used for frivolous purposes like having fun and raising children and reading tedious emails from your boss. But that doesn't mean they aren't important.
I'm not sure I agree, entirely, that the invention of the web was the key thing. I think really the invention of the internet (TCP/IP, DNS, routers, running cables) were the big thing. And it inevitably led to apps running on it, which became gradually more sophisticated. Email, Usenet, Veronica, Gopher, and eventually, the browser and HTML.
In a sense what you're suggesting is somewhat analogous to saying Microsoft Word was more important than the PC. Though I guess you could argue that Microsoft Windows was at least as important as the PC.
I agree about the importance of, e.g., TCP/IP. But we're headed for James Burke territory now. It's ultimately kind of pointless to argue which inventions in a chain were more important than others: What are the criteria? Who is more important, Einstein or Einstein's mother? Where would Einstein have been without his mother?
And inventions tend to come along when their time is right. Lots of important things are invented simultaneously. That makes it hard to argue that, say, the inventors of Gopher were significantly less brilliant than Tim Berners-Lee, or that OS/2 was less significant than Windows 3.1 from any perspective other than hindsight.
All of which ties into what I think is my greater point: Don't be too hard on yourself about the apparent pointlessness of your work. A lot of pointless things turn out to be worthwhile, and a lot of apparently important things turn out to be pointless.
Thanks for the reference to Burke and "Connections".
I'm not sure whether you are using Burke as an example of over- or under-weighting factors in history. I believe the latter, but can see either argument.
Here is the way I (not the GP) would make the case: at the time HTML was invented, we had e-mail, chat, bulletin boards, ftp sites, and news groups. You could download pictures and movies and music (although the bandwidth and processing demands were prohibitive, especially for movies). What we didn't have was any way to visualize this: oh look, someone said that, referring to this, which is visualized by a thumbnail, which takes me to this other thing when I click it. Once this happened, the value proposition finally became obvious to a large swath of the population.
I agree with what you say, but here's a crisper statement: that the web was the first internet service to exploit the usability gains of the graphical user interface.
(There were graphical Usenet clients, but most people used text-mode clients. Even if graphical email clients like Outlook were used by more people than text-mode ones, they weren't significantly better because email wasn't designed to make use of them.)
> And I caution everyone not to fall into the mental trap of overvaluing mass at the expense of momentum
Aha! But the formula for momentum, P = mv, shows that momentum increases linearly with mass. So it's impossible to overvalue mass at the expense of momentum!
The difference here is that we have to see the bigger problem within the small problem. Creating HTML to access documents is a solution to a small problem, storing human knowledge in HTML so they can accessed anywhere in world is a solution to a huge problem. Creating another photo sharing app is a solution to a small (an imo , stupid) problem, captivating real life moments and implementing time shifting solutions is a solution to a huge problem.
And I caution everyone not to fall into the mental trap of overvaluing mass at the expense of momentum. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, it looked kind of silly. And, actually, it has looked kind of silly ever since. But make no mistake: The invention of the web is probably a more important human advance than anything else that has happened in the last twenty years. It has probably already saved more years of human life than the last twenty years of cancer research, for example.
A lot of the problems that people think are important and profound are intractable. Intractable problems don't go away, because they don't get solved. They are around for the long haul. There's time to build institutions around them, to build popular awareness of them, to get really good at marketing them. When someone claims to be working on a Very Important Intractable Problem everyone knows they are Smart.
Whereas many world-changing practical inventions are never profound. They are always either silly or boring. They start off silly. When you first invent the mobile radio people laugh at you, because you are a ham radio geek and you carry around some big ugly boxes in a van. Then mobile radios become frivolous things carried only by the CEOs in the movie Wall Street. Then they become frivolous things carried only by hipsters. Then they become frivolous things carried only by salarymen. Then they become frivolous things carried by the young. And then... they become ubiquitous, no big deal, boring. In a handful of decades we are going to equip everyone in the world with a goddamn tricorder and society is barely going to consciously notice.
That is a technology with momentum. Yeah, nobody takes mobiles seriously. They're disposable, and they never work as well as you think they should, and they're used for frivolous purposes like having fun and raising children and reading tedious emails from your boss. But that doesn't mean they aren't important.