Where to start... I jotted this quote down, which might be a good starting point:

Digital communication gives us the illusion of companionship, without the demands of friendship; it gives us the illusion of progress, without the demands of action.

The focal point of her book, in my opinion, is that she describes our generation's 'flight from conversation'. She doesn't beat around the bush: we've willfully eroded and replaced valuable, face-to-face conversation in favor of easier, more comfortable but less meaningful digital communication.

She uses a bunch of archetypes to hit her point home, for example when she describes the friend group where most people are glued to their phones most of the time. Or when she describes the 'always-connectedness' of highschoolers. Or when she describes teenagers unwilling to call because that conversation might not be perfect, preferring the comfort of a well-crafted email instead. Or the girl demanding that her parents stop using their phones and just talk to her.

I am so guilty of the behaviours she describes. Obviously not to the extent she describes, but to an extent that I'm ashamed of. Because I bought into the aforementioned illusions of digital communications, the book felt like someone pulled the rug out from under me. As an example, I always loathed and avoided phone calls like a lot of my peers. So even though I've been living out of the house for years now, I've never called my family to just talk about how things are going. That was probably the first thing I drastically changed — I now call my parents at least once a week, usually more.