I have not read Stolen Focus yet. But I enjoyed Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neal Postman and Bullshit jobs - David Graeber

Thank you! Other users recommended Amusing Ourselves to Death, this is what I was looking for. I'll add it to my list. I'll be enjoying it next week! :)

Wait until they learn about termites!

Right, or the SBIR program more generally.

I saw that Black Mirror, I couldn't make the leap to it happening in real life... Maybe I just don't get it.

the trollface meme was sent to that guys phone in the end.

i took it to mean it was extreme trollcraft, rather than money motivation.

No, that was April 5, 1994... The end of the '90s

Do you worry about your children having large blind spots in pop-culture making it difficult to relate to peers later in life when discussing things and relating the childhood? I've wondered how music taste was going to continue with out FM, but just today my daughter had a google meet with her class where they have to have teams and discuss songs. Between tiktok, youtube, and dance class she did quite well. I imagine 13 year old boys will talk about fortnite how we talk about mario or zelda...

I don't think that's a huge problem. I almost had no interest in anything my classmates talked about but in the morning before going to school, I would open few trending pages and check up news for about 10-15 minutes and drop small hints to start conversation and let them continue since I lacked depth. Discussions are pretty cyclical and repetitive in nature. It's easy to pretend that you care about something superficial because deep down, people are also aware of it.

> Do you worry about your children having large blind spots in pop-culture

I home school my children, and it's intentional that they wouldn't relate to people in a discussion of pop-culture. That's what we're very much trying to avoid. The difference is that you seem to think that's a bad thing, and my family intentionally sacrifices quite a lot to achieve it. My son has never even heard of tiktok, but he talks about the Illiad with his friends.

I get how strange that sounds to someone who doesn't value the same things. We do worry that he may regret the decisions we've made later in life, but that's part of being a parent. Luckily the home-school community is larger than it used to be, and more secular, so he's not as isolated as home school families were in the past. There are plenty of like-minded families around that he'll be able to relate to.

What seneca said below is about what I think/experience too. Pop culture is just that = Pop Culture. It comes like a bubble and pops and is no more...I focus my children on the things that are lasting. By the way, I never played Mario or whatever other game that was. I know my peers did but we didn't have the money for such games.

You don't run icebreaker on Chrome if you want to stay alive in the sprawl... It's like taking a knife to a nuke fight.

And it's known that a bird in many hands is just a gross bunch of fleshy bits with feathers sticking out.