Television is a battleground. Or at least there’s so much theoretical smoke around its hard to see quite what’s going on.

And we know where there’s smoke there’s fire, don’t we?

To put it another way: with so much time taken up with, and of course by, TV; written and talked about TV; written for and talked about on TV; built and manufactured because of TV; money made - and lost - on TV; parliamentary inquiries into TV; ‘concerned citizens’ opposed to TV; companies paid to analyse TV; and a multiplicity of other reponses, processes and histories around and about TV, it is sometimes difficult to see that the players on the field, in a kind of global mêlée (the village is actually over the hill a bit), are human beings, the communities of audiences that make it all happen by just sitting there. Or are they just sitting there? If they are indeed just passively sitting there and television is happening spontaneously then it is truly a perpetual motion machine if there ever was one.

This is a brief examination of some of the issues outlined above. It is focussed on three books: Inside Prime Time, Desperately Seeking Audiences and Tele-ology. However, recommendations for addressing the issues the authors raised seemed to leave the reader curiously unsatisfied, as does a lot of television programming generally. Gitlin showed us the insides of the industry but he answered very few of the problems he uncovered. He only confirmed what we always suspected: that television was "like raising a retarded child". "Its little accomplishments", held back by the psychic retardation of its parent programmers, were all we could ever look forward to. "Compelling alternatives" were outside the scope of his diatribe that essentially bemoaned the lack or rarity of challenging programming.

Ang likewise seems distressed by the fact that the business ethic was ‘taking over’ television, particularly public service television, through its concentration on numbers and ratings. To her this looked a lot like scientists trying to 'behaviourise' and control audiences and by implication society with overly simple models of stimulus-response methodology, and she was right. And Hartley, influenced somewhat by the current state of Australian and British television, sees SBS as a new era in television. A cynic may find it hard to agree with him. But it is harder still to find any real alternatives presented by any of these authors.

But the poor range of programming on most commercial and governmental television and networks, the US dominatde programming of the cable networks, and the parlous and ragtag state of so-called "alternative" community television broadcasters, means that the search for genuine alternatives to current television programming remains one of the unfulfilled techno-dreams of the later twentieth century. And the jury is still out on the web, which is beginning to look a lot like a mere refection of television on the computer screen.

Contained in all critical examinations of institutional television, the most ardent critics being cultural theorists, is concern over an undue institutional reliance on abstracted concepts derived from the use of measurement techniques. These concerns are the concerns of science, not just social science, and have featured in debates over scientific methodology and epistemology since the the theory of relativity destroyed the purely empiricist foundations of the material sciences.

If physics, that most material of sciences, could not agree on whether matter was one thing or another no matter how big your sample size or whatever experimental apparatus you could devise, could there ever be a 'real' social science of the mind (psychoanalysis), a mind that could be understood and controlled by the methodology of numbers? Needless to say, social sciences are still regarded somewhat dubiously, if not wistfully, by the establishment in precisely the same way as are cultural theorists' ideas of the non-material (cultural) benefits of a 'better' television (cf philanthropic trusts in the US - many of them funding alternative television production).

These critical theorists are then actually contesting scientific legitimacy, a legitimacy based on scientific method. However, science is a big edifice to fight, particularly when both Gitlin’s and Ang’s best defense is that institutional theory’s predictive integrity is poor - the well known example of test marketing of new shows failing to pick Hill Street Blues or All In The Family being a prime example - but these and other errors are few and far between (what's a few ratings points between networks?). Largely TV ‘works’. The industrial processes for the manufacture and distribution of new commodity TV products churns out an "excess", as Hartley calls it, of successful product lines each year. A few fail, as they must unless the theory’s predictive powers are absolute, but generally most some shows are successful, in ratios of success to failure not unlike those of its near kin, Hollywood.