Couch potatoes are finally learning how to apply everything they soaked up while vegging out in front of the tube.

Courses in popular culture have recently begun teaching college students how to examine the fads and figures that surround them, through the study of popular mediums such as television, film and rock 'n' roll.

With modern technology advancing at an increasingly rapid pace, especially in entertainment fields, it's not surprising that we need classes to keep up with the changes.

But though the books, teachers and classroom materials may have found their places only recently, the subject matter is as old as time itself.

Today it's Madonna. In the 1950s, it was Elvis Presley, and in the 1930s and 1940s, it was Babe Ruth. Ruth's cultural image is a composite of all the media -- mainly advertisements and photo journals -- that surrounded him in the 1920s, said Patrick Trimble, an integrative arts instructor.

"Far more people knew Babe Ruth that way than ever saw him play ball," said Trimble, who teaches Theater 109 -- Drama and the Mass Media, Arts 10 -- Popular Media Arts and Comm 150 -- The Art of the Cinema.

And although to the casual observer, Ruth and Madonna seem polar opposites, Trimble can draw a comparison.

"How many people have actually seen Madonna live?" he asked. "Much of what we know about Madonna comes to us through those medium. Figures can deliver media messages so much better today."

Beginning in the 1970s, professors began to take a more serious look at modern entertainment devices such as films and albums, once considered "just for fun."

The electronic technology of recent years has made mass media much more accessible, enabling instructors to bring the information to students in a classroom format, said Bill Kelly, an integrative arts professor. Part of the reason art forms such as the Walkman, videocassette recorder and CD require a lot of attention is because they are so sophisticated, he said.

"The average student now carries his music with him," Kelly said. "You couldn't do that 10 years ago."

These modern media forms are responsible for keeping Elvis alive, as well as what he stood for -- the rejection of traditional values, Trimble added. And popular music's rejection of traditional values is reinforced by modern technology in an almost vicious cycle.

"The music you love to listen to, your parents hate," he said. "We like grunge -- buy a $35 pair of blue jeans and tear the knees out of them. It's a sign of rebellion. In 20 years, you'll look back and say, 'What the hell are these young kids doing?' "

But Kelly doesn't seem to be encountering this generation gap.

"I find myself as likely to go to a rock 'n' roll concert as a I am to an opera," he said. "I'm as likely to listen to (Gustav) Mahler as Depeche Mode. I don't find that weird."

In the past, the popular idiom and the fine-art idiom were two completely separate worlds, but those distinctions are changing, Kelly said. When an artist such as David Byrne can move rather freely between writing film scores, opera scores and songs for the Talking Heads, it proves that artists are seeing less and less of the previously strict boundaries.

"With the postmodern rage of the past couple of decades, the arts are borrowing from each other," Trimble agreed, citing as examples pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

And when the subject matter begins overlapping, the courses begin to blur at the edges, too, said Mary Welke, who received her master's in popular culture from Bowling Green and is now working as a part-time popular-culture instructor at her alma mater.

"It's nice when the music department is open to classes that kind of walk the line of popular-culture classes and traditional-music classes," Welke said.

The boundaries and attitudes change when audiences, such as today's, are open to all forms of art, Kelly said, adding that the change will continue because tomorrow's artists rise out of that audience.

And if tomorrow's artists turn out anything like yesterday's superstars, school subjects could be a little more fun and a little less, well, dated. Books on the disco craze would be required reading, MTV would start playing Mozart videos alongside Aerosmith and Rebel Without a Cause would be compared to a Greek tragedy.