The fact that such a great proportion of human knowledge is now available to such a great proportion of human beings is enormous, and holds enormous ongoing potential. The fact that every nut-job on earth ("The earth is flat!") now (potentially) has a platform is a huge negative, and the fact that on-line discourse so often has a beyond-ugly tone is a big negative as well. If the hype is simply "This will have a huge impact", without regard to positive or negative, the WWW stands out well beyond LeBron James, the Iliad, or anything else I've heard mentioned so far (No offense meant to LeBron or Homer).