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Hyperconnectivity is spreading beyond workers who are tethered to smartphones all day and night—families now wake up and get online first thing in the morning. Is yours one of them?

The New York Times recently highlighted the dramatic change in many families' mornings, noting that kids are hopping on Facebook while Mom and Dad are checking up on e-mail and Twitter the minute they wake up. 

Most firms that analyze Web traffic note that things slow down overnight but spike pretty high first thing in the morning—especially for websites that are consumer or socially oriented. Text messages in the morning are even up—according to Verizon, texts sent between 7 am and 10 am rose 50 percent year-over-year.

To those who Twitter, the reporter who investigates a story before offering it to the public must also seem tediously ruminant. On Twitter, the notes become the story, devoid of even five minutes of reflection on the writer's way to the computer. I can see that there are times —an airplane landing in the Hudson, a presidential election in Iran—when this type of impromptu journalism becomes a necessity, and an exciting one at that. Luckily, reporters still exist to make sense of information bytes and expand upon them for readers—but for how much longer? I worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers. How can Twittering stories from laptops and phones possibly replace the attentive journalist who tucks a digital recorder artfully under a notepad, pencil behind one ear, and gives full attention to the subject at hand?

I went home after the lecture and—hypocritically, I admit—updated my Facebook status and my blog to declare how much I despise Twitter.

Twitter serves as a source of links to longer news stories.