By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Like many writers, Jonathan Franzen is a serious believer in isolation. He has declared it “doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” He has claimed to write behind soundproof walls and double-pane windows, lights off, blindfolded, earplugged and earmuffed.

This idea of the island writer — secluded, in but not of the world, aloofly authoritative — is old and enduring. And that endurance is remarkable, for in general these are dire times for remote priesthoods claiming special access to the Truth.

In field after field, the information authorities face disruption, with new equations of power replacing the old. Newspapers are learning to let readers talk back. Now that enthusiasts have made a reference work out of Wikipedia, encyclopedias are allowing their audience to write them. Companies are discovering that they must “engage” with their customers, not just advertise at them.

What do these new equations of influence — the shift from “power over” to “power with” others, as some describe it — mean for the writer? For in this and other ways, modern life challenges the picture of the writer-as-island.

For one thing, the writer is besieged by an ever more instantaneous culture. In our time, velocity has found a moral status once reserved for things like chastity. Google saves us seconds by completing our searches. Journalists must file for the Web fast, before they’ve had a minute to think. Cable pundits must respond at once to every little happening in public life.

The pressure of this culture is to burp out the thought you have right now — regardless of its quality, regardless of how it connects to your other thoughts.

The best writing, of course, is often the opposite of instantaneous. The transcendent illustration of this is Walt Whitman, who published “Leaves of Grass” over 26 years, tweaking and buffing and adding new poems until the end.

Some time ago, interviewing the writer V.S. Naipaul, I struggled to get him to do what writers are often asked to do: to apply published insights to new territory — in a way, to become a pundit. I realized, the more I struggled, that Mr. Naipaul, in refusing these prompts, was defending a notion of writing that is at war with instantaneousness.

“There are two ways of talking,” he said. “One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. I wouldn’t put my name to the easy thoughts, because you can often have outrageous views, passionate views, and that’s the source of your thoughts, eventually. But when they occur, they are very rough and brutal. And so a lot of writers’ time is spent in working out or refining coarse thought.”

If the instantaneous culture threatens this idea of refined thoughts, so does the prevalence of feedback. The writer now moves in a world that not only expects speed, but also floods her with data on how she’s doing as she does it — from Amazon sales ranks to most-e-mailed lists to hashtagged reviews of books by readers who have just begun to read them.

Writers, like everyone else, relish feedback. But many will tell you that their art requires sequestration from feedback, for a time, to go into the creative wilds and let their minds roam freely — and then, when it’s time, return to the world and be judged. With no judgment at all, their art would die. But with always-on judgment, it may never reach the status of art.

Feedback loops could make writing more of a meritocracy, just as YouTube makes it easier for gifted, off-the-grid singers to go viral and thus find a record deal. But if the writing world becomes just another segment of the market economy, with writers compelled, as they increasingly are, to be entrepreneurs and marketers, its essential character will change.

The digital age confronts the writer with the tyranny of numbers: you can know instantly exactly how many books you did sell, just as Web sites can measure page views and Twitter can identify trending words.

Along with this deluge of feedback is the new ethic of openness. From open-source software to OpenTable restaurant reservations to the open pastures of Creative Commons, modern life agitates against the closed-off and the exclusive.

And so writers are encouraged to open up, shed their mystique, reveal the innards of their craft. The best-selling Brazilian writer Paolo Coelho — more attuned than other writers, perhaps, to whatever is perceived as modern — has experimented by sharing glimpses of his writing life on Twitter, encouraging feedback from his readers and even broadcasting a live video of himself writing his next book.

“They used to see writers as wise men and women in an ivory tower, full of knowledge, and you cannot touch them,” Mr. Coelho recently told an interviewer. “The ivory tower does not exist anymore. If the reader doesn’t like something they’ll tell you. He’s not or she’s not someone that is isolated.”

This opening up of the process may fit the zeitgeist, but it terrifies many writers. Yet is Mr. Coelho right? Must the writer, like corporations and governments everywhere, accept a fundamental shift in what is kept open and what kept closed?

Some serious writers show a way forward. Teju Cole, the Nigerian writer and photographer, is an avid user of Twitter, using it not to expound on the Super Bowl, but to remix and rewrite Nigerian headlines in a deft, literary way. Salman Rushdie, a defender of Writing with a capital W, has found a way to balance that literary seriousness with new habits of launching tweet-wars, informing us where he is, and reviewing books in 140 characters, always with his trademark wit.

The question, perhaps, is this: As the writer surrenders to these new possibilities, what will be her role in the instantaneous, feedback-driven, open world? Will there be a place for those other, slower thoughts, ideas that take time and quiet to flower, truths that cannot be crowdsourced?