By ELIZABETH JENSEN
Los Angeles Times

For millions of TV viewers, "Survivor" is part escapism and part game show, a chance to watch attractive, scantily clad contestants battle physically and psychologically in beautiful, contrived settings.

Who knew that it was also about "self-reflexivity"?

Or that it was a metonymy of global capital and a great case study in ignominy, or the "audiovisualization of shame," which "challenges long-held assumptions about the boundaries of genre and representation"? And why do you really watch? Because of the "mathematical processes of prediction and the narrative processes of textual pleasure."

Academia has tuned in to television, and it's TV's most of-the-moment shows that are garnering much of the interest. It's part of a broader, not universally lauded trend in cultural studies that is pushing pop culture front and center.

The maturing of the medium, and recording technology that has allowed previously ephemeral TV work to remain accessible in archival form, and students' comfort level with video texts rather than written ones have all come together in the last few years to give new impetus to a discipline once derided as not serious enough to merit scholarly study.

But like the medium it studies, it's a fast-changing discipline, an "embryonic stew," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of literature David Thorburn, one of the first U.S. academics to study television years ago. As TV studies have reached a point where they're a staple on campuses around the country, "it's a discipline really searching for its own voice," adds Ron Simon, curator of television at the Museum of Television and Radio and a teacher at New York University and Columbia University.

Ghen Maynard, the CBS executive who first championed "Survivor" at the network and now oversees it as senior vice president of alternative programming, remembers well the disdain with which his Harvard University professors only recently viewed TV. As a social psychology major, graduating in 1988, Maynard was interested in exploring the pro-social effects television could have on a culture, as opposed to the prevailing views of TV as a corrupting influence. Most of his professors just sniffed.

"I was told I was just trying to justify my own viewing habits," Maynard, now 36, recalls. "Whether it was because of snobbery or elitism, they just didn't think it was worth the time."

How times have changed. The first weekend in May, Maynard was back in Cambridge, Mass., home of Harvard, but he was down the street at MIT, as one of several guest speakers at a three-day Media in Transition conference on the state of television.

MIT has long been a home for scholars concerned with the effects of media on society; Ithiel de Sola Pool developed his pioneering work here on communication technology and its global social and political impact, and the MIT Media Lab is the home of cutting-edge research into the use of digital technology. But this conference, which drew 225 scholars from around the world, was about the trends in TV studies.

In Maynard's session, one California State University, Fullerton academic wanted to know whether a "Big Brother" Internet rumor she had read was true. Another scholar was interested in what CBS thinks about "spoilers" who try to leak or alter the results of unscripted shows. Just a few questioners challenged the concept of such shows.

While some of the 115 papers presented looked at, say, how national programming affected life in rural Brazil or TV's role in the Northern Ireland conflict, a full 16 papers discussed unscripted, or reality TV. The scholars were clearly well-versed in their material; at a standing-room-only session on reality TV, an obscure reference to one of the players in the first season of "Survivor" brought knowing laughter and lots of nods.

In today's climate even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has spawned its own online academic journal called www.slayage.tv and a call for papers for an upcoming "Buffy" scholarly convention lists 164 possible topics for study.

TV studies programs, in various configurations, are booming, whether they are labeled cultural studies, media or comparative communications. In recent years, the "stew" has entailed everything from courses on "Star Trek and Religion" (Indiana University) to how TV journalists worldwide cover war to links between children and TV violence. It draws from departments as diverse as anthropology, environmentalism, feminist studies, literature, philosophy, engineering and history. A lecturer is as likely to show up in a torn punk T-shirt as in a tweed jacket.

Engineering school Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York started its hybrid Electronic Media, Arts and Communication program just five years ago, to provide "skills in hands-on arts design and communication combined with a broad cultural perspective," and soon had 200 students.

"There's no question that when you are teaching people in a literature course, they just don't have the habit of encountering a written text in the same way as they do film or television where they are certainly more literate," says June Deery, an associate professor, explaining part of the booming phenomenon. Professors too, she says, have gravitated to the topic for similar reasons, not to mention that "it's had such a profound effect on culture."

Particularly for professors in the under-40 generation, raised in a world when television was always a force, there is an acceptance of the medium that older academics didn't share.

"Very few in my generation were interested in television," says Thorburn, 62, the director of the MIT Communications Forum, organizer of the conference. He compares the emergence of television scholarship to the time when colleges started studying theater as well as the novel.

"Today's high culture was very often yesterday's popular culture," Thorburn said, adding that none of the instructors at Oxford or Cambridge was studying Shakespeare when the Bard was writing his plays.

Moreover, he says, even shows that aspire to something other than high art, like FX's "The Shield," "can be illuminating from a historical, cultural standpoint."

"There's nothing that says academia has got to wait," says Horace Newcomb, another TV studies pioneer and the director of the Peabody Awards. "It was a long time before Faulkner got taught in universities, and that was a mistake."