(Not) Using the Remote Commercial Television Service to Dispel Distance in Rural and Remote Western Australia

This paper addresses issues of ‘distance’ between remote and metropolitan audiences, and the use of communications technologies as tools to dispel such distance. Using the satellite-delivered RCTS broadcasting as a case study — given that this was part of the thrust to ‘dispel’ this distance — the research reported here interrogates notions of difference and inclusion as perceived, experienced and expressed by people resident in remote and regional Western Australia. The argument advanced is that new communications technologies do not dispel distance; rather, they act as catalysts through which distance is re-experienced and redefined. These distinctions are of continuing and growing importance in a climate within which Networking the Nation and digital TV again promise more equalisation of differences and services, and more dispelling of distance.