“You Either Get It or You Don’t”: Conversion Experiences and <i>The Dr. Phil Show</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using The Dr. Phil Show as a case study, this paper explores the processes of secularization and sacralization in the media spectacle of talk television. It argues that TheDr. Phil Showemploys the religious narrative of conversion to frame the personal experiences and the problems of participants. Using discourse analysis, the paper examines two shows that exemplify this narrative: “Addiction” and “The Weight Loss Challenge.” It argues that the morphology of conversion is comprised of two components: the confessional and the testimonial. As participants proceed through these ends of the spectrum of the conversion narrative, a transformation of self is depicted. The televised presentation of reoccurring conversions functions to produce a sense of moral authority, self-empowerment, and an imagined community. The paper concludes that the boundary between the sacred and the secular blur in this highly commodified television spectacle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".