My fellow futurist and author Anthony Townsend pointed me to this New York Times piece by Tony Perrettet on writing and distraction:

Literary distraction seems a very modern problem. These days, distracted writers tend to blame the Internet, whose constant temptations shred our attention spans, fragment every minute and reduce us to a permanent state of anxiety, checking e-mail every 30 seconds — “like masturbating monkeys,” a writer friend once put it, a phrase of which Sade himself might have approved. But history is filled with writers who, like the marquis, could function only in extreme — and involuntary — isolation….

Today, however, being chained to the desk, as the expression goes, is no longer a guarantee of productivity. Who can stick with the blank page when the click of a mouse opens up a cocktail party of chattering friends, a world-class library, an endless shopping mall, a game center, a music festival and even a multiplex? At once-remote literary colonies, writers can now be spotted wandering the fields with their smartphones, searching for reception so they can shoot off a quick Facebook update. These days, Walden Pond would have Wi-Fi, and Thoreau might spend his days watching cute wildlife videos on YouTube. And God knows what X-rated Web sites the Marquis de Sade would have unearthed.

It’s wonderful that writers can access medieval manuscripts, Swahili dictionaries and collections of 19th-­century daguerreotypes at any moment. But the downside is that it’s almost impossible to finish a sentence without interruption… [An] urgent scientific study might be conducted on the devastation Wi-Fi has caused to world literature. The damage is surely incalculable.

Although everyone I know acknowledges the problem of digital distraction, there is surprisingly little resistance. In New York literary circles, anyone who doesn’t have a Twitter account qualifies as a radical Luddite.