Abstract
Television in Europe is going through a period of transition. The 'second age' of broadcasting was the age of television: the new, or 'third age' is a television age of a different kind, as Europeans move into a multi-channel environment. The new multi-channel environment underpins a fragmentation of the audience into smaller viewing groups than those which traditional television could command. In addition, this environment has the power to destabilise the experience of individual viewers, who may become less sure than before of what they are watching, who is talking to them and when, and where the broadcast is originating from. The new viewing environment can produce juxtapositions which are unplanned in any production process. The kinds of juxtapositions which are of most importance in coming to terms with the new TV world are those which affect phenomenological stability, namely the parameters of space and time. Those new temporal and spatial relations, which viewers must engage with in constructing textual meaning are potentially the most destabilising. In this paper we distinguish between a stronger and a weaker version of the argument that the new audiovisual environment is inherently destablising, and promote the weaker version, as being more analytically secure than the postmodernist alternative.