I've been mapping the various ways we use the term distraction. In my Taming the Digital Monkey, whose first draft astonishingly is drawing to its conclusion, I talk about how we use terms like multitasking, intelligence, memory, and distraction to mean a number of different things, and how this leads to various kinds of confusion about how our minds are affected by our interactions with information technologies.

via flickr

Sometimes the term distraction refers to a state caused by external pressures: multiple people asking things of us at once, devices constantly banging on the doors of our perception.

Sometimes it's something that reflects an inner issue: we're distracted by money problems, or just feel fuzzy-headed.

And sometimes we use the term to refer to something good: for example, we can speak of "welcome distractions," things that provide a nice respite from our problems. (There's also a band called A Welcome Distraction. That they're based in Southern California is just more proof that the land down there really is a whole different country. Bands up here are much more likely to be called Ritalin or Transcranial Stimulation.)

As part of this I re-read novelist Hanif Kureishi's New York Times essay on "The Art of Distraction." I confess the first time I read it I didn't think much of it, but this time I've found it better going. Kureishi isn't defending all forms of distraction, but arguing that it can have its place in the development of an independent mind. A mediocre student, Kureshi recalls going through his father's library and discovering, "more or less randomly, fascinating things while supposedly doing something else."

Essentially, what he's arguing is that we collapse together several things that don't really belong into a kind of vague notion of productivity, just as I argue we conflate different forms of distraction. As he puts it, "it is incontrovertible"

that sometimes things get done better when you’re doing something else. If you’re writing and you get stuck, and you then make tea, while waiting for the kettle to boil the chances are good ideas will occur to you…. Some interruptions are worth having if they create a space for something to work in the fertile unconscious. Indeed, some distractions are more than useful; they might be more like realizations and can be as informative and multilayered as dreams. They might be where the excitement is.

This is what you might call the virtuous micro-distraction, the equivalent of a turn around the Sandwalk. Then there's the kind that takes the form of pursuing an interest that the world doesn't approve of:

There might be more to our distractions than we realized we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to.

But even with this kind, "a person requires a method:"

He must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can work only if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself — if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.

So he's really talking about "arts of distraction"– the plural, not a single art. And his distraction isn't merely time-wasting; it's kin to the "independence and disobedience" that lets people pursue radical or challenging ideas. Far from being unproductive, it holds the potential to produce radical new ideas, or very big ones. And finally, it's not mindless: being "an artist of his own life," who is "in good communication with himself," is anything but.

Okay, back to being more obviously productive.