Back to dissertation.

I would like to warmly thank all the W3C members who are working and fighting for the web as a social and accessible media.

My hope and faith that we are headed somewhere stem in part from the frequently proven observation that people seem to be naturally built to interact with others as part of a greater system … If we end up producing a system in hyperspace that allows us to work together harmoniously, that would be a metamorphosis. Though it would, I hope, happen incrementally, it would result in a huge restructuring of society. A society that could advance with intercreativity and group intuition, rather than conflict as the basic mechanism would be a major change. If we lay the groundwork right and try novel ways of interaction on the new Web, we may find a whole new set of financial, ethical, cultural and governing structures to which we can choose to belong , rather than having to pick ones we happen to physically live in. Bit by bit, those structures that work best would become important in the world, and democratic systems might take on different shapes.

 

(Berners Lee 1999:224)

And of course David Duce, Jonathan Bishop, Bill Johnston, Daniel Dardailler, Frederic Cavazza, Luc Cynober and Julien Rateau.