There's something romantic about the image of René Descartes locking himself in a cabin to write his Meditations on First Philosophy. His project is to examine his beliefs one by one, in order to determine which of them are impervious to doubt. He reports, in the very first paragraph of the work, that he only finds himself able to approach this task because "I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares, and [...] I am in the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement." When I first read this passage in Philosophy 101, I got it into my mind that this kind of self-imposed, distraction-free isolation was necessary for the production of really excellent writing.

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The idea haunts me, though. Descartes had the money to finance a sojourn in Bavaria, while I most certainly do not. Moreover, the distractions that Descartes strove to avoid in 1641—backgammon, books, and beer—seem both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the distractions I find on my desk in 2009. On my desk sit two computers. One shows an email account, my instant messaging client, and my Twitter feed; the other displays another email inbox, my calendar, some spreadsheets, and a collection of blog posts I mean to read before the day is over. My phone has been ringing all day. And when I get home, TiVo and Facebook beckon. On top of this, I enjoy the same sorts of games, reading, and socializing that Descartes did. If good writing requires a distraction-free environment, then Descartes and his contemporaries were, all other things being equal, much more likely to write well than I am. That's a depressing thought.

An obvious way out of the modern predicament is to tune out the distractions. However powerful their allure might be, electronic temptations all share the vulnerability of an off switch. Window blinds, a locked bedroom door, and a good set of ear plugs can replicate, in a noisy New York apartment, the isolation of Descartes's cabin. Every distraction we manage to block out gets us one step closer to the Cartesian ideal of perfect concentration.

A more radical approach is to question the assumption that distraction is unequivocally bad for writing. Where does the assumption come from? Here's a theory. Out of the Cartesian mythos grows the idea that within the mind of every great writer is a font from which wisdom emanates. Scholarship is an art of thought, and thought exists not in the ether between us but within the confines of an individual mind. Thus if we want to engage in scholarship, we need to pare away all those things which are outside of our own thought.

So goes the mythos. To what extent has this ever really been true, though? Descartes himself was a well-read scholar, and the work that he did can be seen as part of a larger conversation that took place within a network of like-minded scholars. We might visualize his network in the following way: Descartes is a node, a nexus, a point; the scholars with which he directly and indirectly corresponded through books and letters are also nodes; and the books and letters by which their communication took place are like the lines that connect the points of the network to each other. We can tell the nodes apart from the connections because the connections are static and slow-moving (books that take years to be written and disseminated through a community of thinkers) while the nodes are vibrant and fast-moving (the mind of the scholar is constantly in flux). Insofar as the thinking that happens throughout this community affected the content of, say, the Meditations, a convincing argument might be made that the work of Descartes is not the product of Descartes at all, but rather is an emergent feature of his network. Of course, the pen that put the thoughts to paper was held in a hand attached to the man we call Descartes, but when we ask about the authorship of his ideas, the source is not so clear-cut.

If Descartes's works arose out of a network to which he belonged, then clearly it was to his benefit to allow himself to be "distracted" by the other nodes in this network, at least in some ways. And if this was true for Descartes, it is far more true for us today. The features that distinguished the nodes of Descartes's network from the connections between those nodes were technological in nature - the technologies of the printing press, the delivery of mail, and so on. As new technologies develop, these distinguishing features tend to fade. The speed of communication used to depend on how quickly a book could be published; now it depends on how quickly you can type your Facebook updates. As the speed of information flow through our own networks approaches the speed of thought, the notion of an individual author who alone is responsible for a text becomes less well defined.

To take the point a step further, it might be argued that each subsequent generation stands to gain even more from the kinds of internet distractions that plague so many of us. Technology is, of course, constantly changing. But people are changing too - becoming more accustomed to the constant hum of distraction around them, unable to work without it, in much the way that a city person might not be able to get to sleep in the quiet countryside. An individual who grows up with Facebook, for example, might find it easier to appreciate how the network can serve as an extension of the five senses, a more or less natural way to collect and process information.

All this is not to say that there are no bad distractions. Certainly the Internet has multiplied many times over the number of alternative subjects for our attention. But there is a real argument to be made for a new kind of thinking about the distractions that the Internet provides, and how they differ from the distractions that Descartes faced. When you think with your fingers on the computer keys, you do not think alone, but in pulse with the multitudes who write Wikipedia, who comment on your blog entries, who sit waiting on Facebook or Twitter to workshop your arguments with you. Leveraging the network for the purposes of writing requires the writer to develop a set of skills different from those that Descartes possessed, of course, and this is easier said than done. In order to differentiate between those uses of the network that are productive and those that truly are distractions, one must be able to make some difficult but fundamental value judgments. What is the goal of writing? How do traditional methods of writing, like Cartesian solitude, contribute positively to that goal? Can the distinguishing features of new media – the speed of communication it allows, for example – replicate or improve upon the benefits of traditional methods? If not, are the benefits of the new media worth the sacrifice? It’s easy to skirt these hard questions altogether by simply shutting off the computer, thereby shutting off the distractions. But this strategy, if adopted without first addressing the kinds of questions just raised, threatens to deprive our writing of the richness that lies dormant in the network around us.