Chances are, viewers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer don’t often find themselves contemplating the show’s use of invisible intertexts. Similarly, fans of daytime chat shows are not generally given to cogitating on the effects of Oprahfication on global culture. And there can be very few people who find the time to ponder television trends in Sweden during the 1950s. A conference taking place at MIT this weekend, however, may change all that.

On Friday, 100 speakers from all over the world will converge on Cambridge to attend " MiT3: Television in Transition, " during which they will tackle such knotty TV-related topics as " Survivor As Metonomy of Global Capital, " " Social Status and the Appreciation, Dislike, and Knowledge of Television Comedy in the Netherlands, " and " The Ying and Yang of Contemporary Televisual Textuality. " And, of course, no conference on television would be complete without " the ideological leap from Communism to Oprah. "

While scholarly disquisitions on Knight Rider might get most non-PhDs to reach for the remote, MIT professor David Thorburn, the conference’s director, insists that MiT3 has something to offer everyone — even those who have trouble separating their semiotics from their syntagms. " Although some of the discussions are potentially very theoretical and specialized, " he says, " I think the general public will find many of them interesting. This is supposed to be accessible, a conversation among citizens. "

Thorburn, who was a pioneer of TV studies back in the 1970s, allows that there are many who find his work silly, and some who find it annoying. " I’ve had vituperation from colleagues, " he says. " I’ve had columns written against me. " He insists, though, that he has not lost too much sleep over the criticism. " This is a recurring feature of cultural life, " he says. " Half a generation ago, if you’d have said that movies should be studied, you’d have gotten a cackle of glee. If you were to study Shakespeare in his own day, it would have been laughable. " He adds, " I’m not saying that every TV show is a stunning work of art, only that I appreciate their historical significance. "

Indeed, for Thorburn it’s often the crappiest shows that are most deserving of academic scrutiny. " It’s not obvious on the surface what the significance of these programs are, " he says. " We tend to dismiss them as mere entertainment, which means we don’t have to think about them. But there are assumptions about the organization of family, about relationships between men and women or between different countries embedded in these shows. They can carry covert forms of propaganda or political meaning that need to be recognized. "

Even Thorburn, though, will admit that some of the abstracts for MiT3 border on the absurd — the sociopolitical intersubjectivities, the critical intertextualities, the constituent pluralities. " I do think there is something comical about some of the academic language, " he says. " There are ways in which academics over-complicate things, the silliness of the jargon, but there is ridiculous discourse about almost any subject, not just television. "

" MiT3: Television in Transition " runs Friday, May 2 through Sunday, May 4. There is no admission fee, but registration is recommended. Call (617) 253-3521 or log onto cms.mit.edu/mit3 for details.