Developing the ‘Control Imaginary’: TIME Magazine’s Symbolic Construction of Digital Technologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the shifting representations of control over and via ICTs on the cover of \nTIME magazine (1950‒2017). We focus on the subject positions and forms of agency the \nmagazine ascribes to different social actors and on the solutions advanced for remaining in \ncontrol of technological change. Informed by discourse analysis methodology, our analysis of \nthe corpus (N = 81 covers) identifies four central themes: the configuration of the relationship \nbetween humanity and technology; the construction of youth as both potentially powerful and \nvulnerable “others”; the identification of technocapitalists and creative visionaries as the \nultimately powerful drivers of innovation and progress; and the disruptive effects of virtuality. \nThrough these discourses, the magazine legitimizes an entrepreneurial approach to ICTs as \nthe means to retain agency against the “inevitable” technological development, while also \npositioning the technocapitalist elite as the drivers of our common future.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".