We’ve made a few references to Big Ideas–first to raise the gauntlet and recently intending to drop it. One paragraph from this article set our discussion in motion:

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

David Carr, writing about how Steve Jobs has changed the landscape of multiple businesses, has added a nice twist to the discussion by noting how ideas can become outsized when they take shape as things in a particular way:

Mr. Saffo compared Mr. Jobs to a latter-day Marshall McLuhan, one for whom the media device became the message.

“He used aesthetics and intuition to create objects of desire,” he said, adding that Mr. Jobs saw technological innovation as more than just advances in hardware.

“Steve was the first one to figure out it could produce profound new media experiences,” he said.

In other words, this was no theory of relativity, but it was a matter of remarkable vision.  And it got implemented.  That seems to make Steve Jobs worthy of inclusion in the same paragraph as Einstein or Sagan, because it was not just that Jobs has had good ideas; it was his good ideas made tangible.

Whether we want all the consequences of those tangibles is another matter.  Those musical devices can isolate even as they liberate.  Smart phones can be too intelligent.  Etc.