Aren't we supposed to learn from and be able to "leapfrog" the mistakes of history and escape waste and redundancy to set the agenda for a whole new kind of definably Australian television, media and communications?

Haven't we learned that it is not technology per se, but appropriate use of technology that is important - and something that has to be fought for every step of the way? Where will the alternative, independent programs and ideas be represented in this new media future? Perhaps only on the Web, on one of the forthcoming and cheaper wireless data channels, and in small but important windows like SBS's Eat Carpet, marginalised in a latenite ratings ghetto?

Television and other forms of media are moving into the "televisual" which is a combination of all the "separate" domains of communications. It's useless to compartmentalise and separate these domains and it's useless to separate "content" from "carriage" in two Acts.

Why don't we implement a system to maintain diversity, independence, innovation and local production through the mandated maintenance of outlets for this new media - in all domains of communications - rather than resisting or ignoring other independent points of view and voices, and new media forms and ideas? We need to ensure the door - alternative and independent outlets - is always kept open.

If Community Services Obligations are to die, if the ABC is to be sold or condemned to "die by a death of a thousand cuts", if Telstra is being sold, if government support for communications and media is fading away, and if commercial services are to be given unprecedented freedom to operate and charge for services, and move to new oligolpoly postions across many domains of communications then, at the very least, a lifeline data dialtone in all domains of communications must be rapidy set up and legislated for.

The federal government reviews of commercial television and of telecommunications prior to 1997 present one last opportunity to put such a vision into place, a vision that will make the difference between a one-dimensional television and a visionary telecommunications.

This new vision is possible only on one condition, that we work hard to keep a wide variety of interests involved - the new, the different, the regional, the cultural - and listen to what they have to say, and watch the programs they have to make, to see this future television picture more clearly.

"...we have the capacity to produce an information-handling system of unprecedented capacity. For the moment we don't really know what to do with it. However history suggests that we will find ways to put it to good use, perhaps much sooner than we think. It would be a shame if we did nothing more than watch movies with it.

But we do not have to wait for the further development of the video disc (the digital CD ROM has been around for some years now and the digital video disc has recently been released) to see what video and computers can do together. That connection has already been made." (Stuart deLuca, Television's Transformation: the Next 25 Years, Barnes and Co., NY, 1980, p 264).

Television's Future Vision Bibliography and Appendices >

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