One of the unpredictable things about writing and publishing books is that you rarely know who else is writing books that'll come out the same season as yours. In my case, Catherine Steiner-Adair's The Big Disconnect has been a kind of döppelganger, a book that gets mentioned in the same reviews and articles.

A couple days ago, Seattle Child ran an article by Cheryl Murphin talking about The Big Disconnect and The Distraction Addiction, and it's interesting to see how readers react to the two:

I am feeling a bit wrung out at the moment. I spent the weekend flip-flopping between parental self-flagellation and the weak hope that I might still guide my technology-addicted couch-potato kids to a more Zen-like relationship with the digital world in which they live. This emotional rollercoaster was launched by two books: The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age by Catherine Steiner-Adair and Teresa H. Barker, and Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul. The title lengths alone knocked the wind outta me.

You should read the whole thing, but a couple highlights are after the jump.

Seattle's Child also interviews me about contemplative computing.

How many times, Steiner-Adair asks me, have I multi-tasked on my kids – continued typing while pretending to give them my attention? Like a bespectacled librarian stink-eyeing kids roughhousing down her aisles, she lumps me right in with a generation of parents who are "unavailable, disconnected or narcissistic."…

Ugh, I thought as I put that book down, looked across the room to my happy-go-lucky 15-year-old (digitally, I should add, as we Skyped between Los Angeles and Seattle), and picked up The Distraction Addiction.

Within a few pages, a sense of relief and hope began to rise within me. While both books are divine works of jargon, The Distraction Addiction has words I'm at least familiar with: meditation, mindfulness, balance, rest, peace … all concepts I encourage my kids to practice even while they dope up on Netflix. And according to author Pang it's not too late: My kids can lead level-headed, focused lives and still spend serious amounts of time on their digital apparatus. …

Unlike The Big Disconnect, The Distraction Addiction offers me topics for dinner conversation I can look forward to without dread. I can envision a thoughtful discussion of why we tweet with my daughter rather than a one-directional rant on how tweeting will make her arthritic.

Now, this is not to say that The Big Disconnect is a bad book: I find it well-written, and for some parents the shock therapy of looking at their own technology practices is just what they need. But Murphin's not the first person to find The Distraction Addiction the more optimistic of the two.