Not everyone is in such awe of the internet.(Editorial; Opinion, Columns)

Byline: Richard Godwin

CALL it Travis syndrome. At the dawn of the Millennium, when everyone was making lists of the greatest albums of all time, the rained-upon Scottish quartet were considered one of the bands of the century. It is not to disparage their melancholy muse to suggest that the release date of their long player The Man Who -- 1999 -- may have played its part in their being consistently judged superior to Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. Travis syndrome -- overestimating the significance of the present -- is a common human foible. It is at play when the commentator asks the summariser: "Is it fair to say this Carling Cup final is the most important match in Arsenal's history?" And it explains why those polled by the website Genes Reunited decided that the most important event of the last 100 years was not the Second World War, nor the Moon landing, but the invention of the internet.

However, when this was reported on the radio, the Twitter community were so delighted by John Humphrys's embarrassing confusion of the net and the web that no one thought to question this bamboozling assertion.

It is, of course, remarkable that we can put in an Ocado order, Skype our longlost aunt in Winnipeg and tweet sushi for lunch today #japan #solidarity without leaving our desks. Spend a little time with tech entrepreneurs and you're left in no doubt that the internet will change our lives in more profound ways too, perhaps with greater geopolitical ramifications than Hitler's invasion of Poland. It just hasn't done so yet.

In fact, as the economist Ha-Joon Chang has observed, the washing machine is arguably the more significant invention. By reducing the time it takes to wash a typical load from four hours to 41 minutes it has -- along with the electric iron, oven and vacuum cleaner -- lifted women from domestic servitude and radically altered family dynamics and the global labour market.

Even if you look at information technology, it's not quite so simple. A couple of centuries ago you could get a message from London to New York in two weeks. The introduction of the telegraph in 1868 shrank that to around seven-and-a-half minutes. The internet allows us to send information more or less instantly -- but you could say the significant leap has already been made.

I'm all for investment in tech but we must put it into perspective. There is a common idea that the internet will allow the developing world to bypass industrialisation.

For most of the world's population, access to water and electricity remain more immediate priorities than having wi-fi. As for politics, even the evangelists at the recent SXSWi festival were warning against the "flattering notion that we in the West have the source code for democracy". Just ask a Libyan, who is probably more concerned about the AK-47.