In this paper I discuss “Television Futures in Australia” and social science's attempts to describe that future. In the first part of the paper I note characteristics of the discussion of television futures drawing attention to the communicative positions of the various industry players and their resulting debate cultures. I also insist on the role played by mundane actions of agents in the broader television milieu. In the remainder of the essay, I discuss some characteristics of television generally not in dispute identifying the ways various agents—industry and social scientists alike—apprehend the future by projecting alternative uptake scenarios. In one way or another all these questions come back to questions surrounding Australian content which I want to pose in the first instance not so much as a question of content regulation as a question of distribution of cultural discounts in program formats.
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op. cit., pp. 1, 2, 4.
Quoted by Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1982, p.77.
Court, op. cit., p.1.
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See James Carey, ‘Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan’, in N. Rosenthal et al., McLuhan: Pro and Con, Pelican, Baltimore, 1972, pp.270–308; Ian Angus and Brian Shoesmith, Dependency/Space/Policy. Continuum, 7 (1), Centre for Research in Culture and Communications, Perth, 1993.
Ian Hayne, ‘New technologies and broadcasting policies’, Communications Research Forum, Bureau of Transport and Communications Economics, Sydney, October 1995, p.21.
ibid, p.13.
ibid, p.25.
Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations (FACTS), Facts of Australian Content in Television Programme Schedules, FACTS, Sydney, 1970.
Jo Hawke, ‘Privatising the public interest: the public and the Broadcasting Services Act 1992’, in J. Craik, J. James Bailey and A. Moran (eds), Public Voices: Private Interests. Australia's Media Policy, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1995, p.40.
Tim Dwyer, ‘Pay TV policies: Are Audiences the “users” who will pay?’, in Craik, James Bailey and Moran (eds), op.cit., pp.102.
Toby Miller, ‘Striving for difference: Commercial radio policy’, in Craik, James Bailey and Moran (eds), op.cit., p. 100.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p.112.
Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT), Oz Content An Inquiry into Australian Content on Australian Television, Vol.1, ABT, Sydney, 1991.
Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992, p.46.
Tom O'Regan, Australian Television Culture, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 1993, pp.10–13.
ibid, pp. 87–91.
ibid, pp.57–79.
Colin Hoskins and Rolf Minis, ‘Reasons for the US dominance of the international trade in television programmes’, Media, Culture and Society, 10(4), 1988, pp.499–515.
Hoskins and Minis argued that because the US had the least imported programming proportionally producers outside the US faced in the US market the highest cultural discount. This seemed to suggest that the US erected cultural barriers to the circulation of overseas programming where they needed to account for the economic incentives to indigenize — sometimes at significantly greater expense than to use cheaper English language imports.
Television Business International, World Guide, TBI, 1990, p.508.
FACTS, op.cit., p.10.
Steven S. Wildman and Stephen E. Siwek, International Trade in Films and Television Programs, Ballinger Publishing, Cambridge, Mass., 1988, p.37.
op.cit, p.8.