Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguish
able from magic. " The language of magic is evident in much of popular discourse about
computers. A content analysis of Time magazine reporting on computers and related
technologies over a ten-year period revealed that 36 percent of all these stories used
explicitly magical or religious language. Together with a qualitative analysis of implic
itly magical themes, the patterns in Time's reporting reveal how magic language was
used as one strategy to stabilize and close the technological frame of personal computers
in the mid-1980s .
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