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This article discusses MTV's Geordie Shore against the backcloth of current social conditions for working-class youth. It suggests that the aesthetic, physical and discursive features of excess represent hyperbole, produced from within an affective situation of precariousness and routed through the labour relations of media visibility. Hyper-glamour, hyper-sex and hyper-emotion are responses to the ideologies of the future-projected, self-governing neoliberal subject and to the contemporary gendered contradictions of sexually proclivity and monogamous heteronormativity. By 'flaunting' the realities of self-work and making the labour of themselves more/most visible, the participants of Geordie Shore are claiming an animated type of ill/legitimate subjectivity.

Audience studies, as they have been traditionally associated with cultural studies, have recognized relations of power at each end of the communication process, privileging the framework of 'text-reader' relations. This article offers an alternative method of reception analysis which seeks to overcome text/reader/context distinctions and place the communicative 'act' itself at the centre. It argues that broadcasting needs to be understood within the terms of communication per se with specific tools designed for that dedicated purpose. A model for reception analysis is offered which captures the specifically communicative relationship between daytime talk programmes and viewers by using a 'text-in-action' approach. The findings illuminate the viewing experiences as pragmatically negotiated discursive encounters, establishing the possibility of a 'mediated conversational floor'.

The more fragmented that engagements with the media become, the more important it is to understand changing audience practices for theories of social shaping. However, capturing the ways in which audiences respond to television is challenging when current technology makes new demands on the viewer: digital television packages offer 'interactive' choices coterminous with computer interfaces. This article proposes a new methodology and demonstrates the kind of data that it makes available for studying digital television audiences. It suggests adapting the traditional metaphor of 'flow' and combining an understanding of television-as-text with television-as-technology to explore the social contexts of new textual possibilities against the backdrop of claims made about 'new media' . This is achieved by allowing the phenomenological aspects of television to inform an empirical study of television in sociocommunicative contexts. Locating mediated communication within everyday social interaction invites questions about what is new about the social shaping of the digital TV interface.

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise.

Radio-telemetry was used to investigate changes in home-range sizes and activity patterns of Rattus fuscipes and Antechinus swainsonii in a subalpine heathland at Perisher Creek, Kosciuszko National Park, southern New South Wales, in response to the accumulation of snow during the winter. We estimated home-range area for each animal during the autumn and winter using two methods, minimum convex polygon and 95% and 50% utilisation contours using the kernel method. With both methods, the home ranges of R. fuscipes and A. swainsonii were significantly smaller (P < 0.001) during the winter than in the autumn. In winter, both species were restricted to areas of dense wet heath close to the main drainage line. R. fuscipes showed signs of social interaction during both seasons, as indicated by location fixes and gnawing damage to radio-collars, in contrast to A. swainsonii, which appeared to remain solitary. In winter, R. fuscipes apparently nested at a single location, whereas during autumn it appeared to use several nest sites. There was no significant change in daily activity patterns between autumn and winter in either species. R. fuscipes remained primarily nocturnal during both prenival and nival periods whereas A. swainsonii continued to be active throughout the diel cycle, although there was a slight shift in its peak activity time from around sunset in autumn to early morning in winter.