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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DOI
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Issues
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Agnes Horvath, Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
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Gibson Burrell, Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Friends, Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at our Universities
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Bas de Boer, How Scientific Instruments Speak: Postphenomenology and Technological Mediations in Neuroscientific Practice
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Bjørn Lomborg, False Alarm
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How does innovation arise in the bicycle sector? The users’ role and their betrayal in the case of the ‘gravel bike’