I've got more than personal experiences, I've got book learnin'. And I'll probably read this book - because that's really what this "opinion" piece is, a puff piece to pump up book sales. So here's my breakdown based on what I've read, what I've observed, and what I've surmised:

1) "Digital natives, ettiquette be damned, kids don't know how to interact anymore."

Gonna agree with this one. People learn to navigate the waters their boat is on. Kids and teens these days are required to be Facebook literate in the extreme. There's no real way to leave school at school; Facebook makes that social sphere a constant experience. Given 24 hours in a day, some of which must be spent sleeping, if you're giving over an extra hour a day to managing your online profile, that's an hour less per day you can give over to meatspace socialization. Sociologists will also point to teenage years as the time when people are most likely to experiment with identity; this is far, far easier online than it is in person.

Inherent in this discussion is the judgement that online interaction is less valuable than interpersonal interaction. I think that depends on what value we're judging. If we're talking about "happiness" then I think it's fair to say that yes, the kids are getting cheated. If we're talking about "culture" then I think it's more accurate to say that the kids are going a different way than their parents. It's a thinner, bleaker world but it's still a world. Sherry Turkle has made a 30-year career out of studying exactly this at MIT.

2) "Blame the parents."

Well, don't blame the kids. They're adapting to an arbitrary ruleset they had no say in crafting. Parents, for their part, largely act in self-interest (so long as you understand the Elizabeth Stone quote: "Having children is like letting your heart walk around outside of your body"). Parents follow societal cues - as they say, kids don't come with an instruction manual, so most parenting is guided by peer pressure. And peer pressure has, increasingly, been about paranoia. Lenore Ashkenazy (the 9-year-old on the NY Subway lady wrote a great book called Free Range Kids that basically breaks down the 31 flavors of paranoia that have seeped in and turned parenting into a horror movie. Long story short, she blames America's Most Wanted. Start on pp. 16; you can "search inside."

I can think of three different kids that got lost in the woods whose searches dragged on days longer because their parents told them "not to talk to strangers." As a consequence, they actively avoided their rescuers despite being alone, hungry and dehydrated in the woods for multiple days. Now - do you blame the parents for that? Or do you make a snap judgement that anybody who tells their kids to go ahead and talk to strangers is a social deviant?

3) "The result, Boyd discovered, is that today’s teens have neither the time nor the freedom to hang out."

There's a Daily Mail article (yeah) called "How Children Lost The Right To Roam in 4 Generations." This graphic used to go with it:

A lot more homework is assigned these days. The focus is on standardized tests. Social media is a necessity. Is everyone so overbooked that they have no time for anything but Facebook and PSATs? Well, sounds like white people problems to me, but Frontline did a pretty goddamn good job of summarizing the problems back in 2008. I wholeheartedly recommend watching it.

4) "Forget the empathy problem—these kids crave seeing friends in person."

I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit on this one. So would Sherry Turkle. So would Frontline. There has never been a generation of teenagers since the invention of the teenager (a largely Post-WWII phenomenon) that has not gotten what they wanted by hook or by crook. Teenagers are not hanging out the way teenagers used to hang out because they have found other acceptable means. Now - did parents and society create those acceptable means? YES. Are the conditions on the ground such that teenagers cannot differentiate between the signals-poor environment of online interaction and the syntactically and symbolism-rich environment of interpersonal contact? YES. Whose fault is that?

WHO CARES? We probably oughtta try and fix it rather than point fingers. Particularly at parents who, if my experiences with my friends and myself are any indication, are mostly just trying not to screw up so hard. Fuck you for blaming me. I'm just trying to keep her from becoming a serial killer and here you are laying the woes of the world at my feet because I bought her an iPhone. Eat a dick, Wired.