Those who are "mediating and partly shaping technological change" in media, have to think about the consequences these transitions have for their own foundations.

Media scientists face a dramatic situation as the blueprint of their unifying subject, mass communication e.g. mass media, is becoming more and more diffuse. Additionally, the converging and diverging media attract strong interest from various other areas of scholarship.

This report offers a status quo on the topics German media studies is dealing with,  and identifies the academic disciplines which offer special potential for innovative work in the field of computer mediated communications.

This paper investigates the techniques and technologies deployed by the computer and Internet industries to track and profile users. The paper questions the manner in which the computer and Internet industries set the default settings in their software and hardware to forcibly customize on-line content for individual users, allowing their every click on the world wide web to be tracked. The paper also critiques the promotional strategies used by Intel, Microsoft, Netscape-America Online and others to promote (and legitimize) their on-line profiling technologies to computer users and the general public. In so doing, I discuss the increasingly public (and political) role that individual programmers have come to play in exposing the secretive nature of such profiling technologies.

While the phenomenon of profiling continues to foster popular interest and political debate -- from best selling FBI novels and television programming such as Profiler, Millennium and Law and Order to the current debate over racial profiling on US highways -- it has also, within the space of two years, come to embody the commercialization of the Internet and the world wide web (in essence producing an on-line consumer). Given the difficulties involved in rating web sites for potential advertisers, the search for more effective tracking and profiling techniques has spawned initiatives by leading corporations. This first section of the paper broadly recounts the problems involved in fostering e-commerce.

The second part of the paper discusses the public debates surrounding computer and Internet profiling technologies. I begin with an account of the first persistent cookie programs integrated into Netscape and Microsoft Internet browsers. In short, cookies are ID files that are saved onto users' hard drives by web sites. The cookie.txt file can customize content and services to the user while it also tracks on-line behavior. Similar techniques encoded in computer processors (Intel's Pentium III chips) and in Microsoft's Windows software have generated a public debate among users, corporations and such government agencies as the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.

The paper concludes that political and legislative responses to on-line privacy issues must also take into account the automation, forced customization and default settings of computer and Internet profiling technologies.

The Learning Curve is a work of hypertext fan fiction, the most complex yet attempted. Written around the events of the fourth and fifth Star Trek films, it extrapolates the effects on Kirk, Spock and McCoy of apparently innocuous choices with life-altering consequences. This paper looks at The Learning Curve as an example of the science-like quality of fan fiction. The restrictions of fan fiction are like the restrictions of experimental science: they make it a more powerful tool, not less. Fan fiction may even be the most powerful literary technique for the exploration of character, emotion and choice: it is the calculus of human nature.