#TWEET10K

This post is my 10,000th Tweet on Twitter.

It's like watching the odometer on my car reach 100,000 miles.

Kinda hard to describe this occasion in under 140 characters. I'd say most of the tweets are from me linking my Facebook with my Twitter account and vice versa and posting that information.

I post a wide variety of information. Mostly news, political commentary, sports, favorite youtube videos, stuff I write.... well, you know.... Y'all follow me on this blog and the various outlets that the Watts News Network has in communicating the message.

What is the message you ask?

We live in a very unique time where social media has earned a place with conventional forms of media: television, radio, and print. Despite the centralization of media sources by a small number of persons with various interests, there is still a Balkanization of our media. I believe that Chris Hayes's book "Twilight of The Elites" points out this very idea. A lot of the media I get is from opening up my Facebook page and seeing what my friends are posting, sharing, and commenting on. Twitter is good about showing what stories are trending and categorizing them.

This idea of a new media outlet infiltrating traditional media is nothing new in the short time humans occupied the planet. Drawing and written words revolutionized record keeping in early human history as they formed communities. Moveable type expanded access to information, decreased the amount of time to produce, and thus increasing the amount of information readily available. Newspapers fueled the American Revolution, Civil War, and Spanish-American War. Lincoln learned election results via the telegraph. Coolidge was the first to give a State of the Union over the radio. In 1947, Truman did it over television. Fifty years later, Clinton was the first to deliver a State of the Union over the internet. Today President Obama's weekly address is offered over an iTunes podcast and YouTube posting.

I still watch the television news though I am disappointed in the decline of quality in local news broadcast in my lifetime and only rely on it for local weather.

We still have newspapers though due to the changing business dynamic of the industry many have gone to online subscriptions and have hired bloggers to cover various issues. Someone shared with me a story about Veterans Issues and what the Texas Legislature (or "The Lege" as we call it in Texas) is doing to help my community out but because I don't have a subscription I can't read it.

I follow what "The Lege" has been doing to help us out because I follow State Senator Leticia Van de Putte (D, SD-26) on twitter and her legislative Facebook page. She's serves as Chair of the Veteran Affairs and Military Installations Committee in the State Senate. Maybe that story has something that I missed in the time period that I am not on social media (like the times that I am in class, reading a book, driving and running errands, sleeping, taking a break from the internet, or like right now... doing some writing). I have my limits after all I am human. Sometimes things fall through the cracks and I do what I can to better educate myself on that topic and item I did not catch.

Speaking of newspapers, even though their dynamic is different than what I grew up with as a child, they still publish letters. I read the letters in the Star-Telegram and Dallas Morning News (and I've been published in those papers). If I need a chuckle, I'll read what's in the Denton Record Chronicle.

All and all, I feel that my contribution on twitter (though small in the grand scope of humanity) is part of documenting history.

Think about it? Someone might study my tweets and Facebook posts a century, maybe two centuries from now as part of a study of Early Social Media Studies.*

(* Provided that we don't destroy ourselves due to global climate change, submitting to our new space ant overlords, or we send astronauts to that HORRIBLE Planet of The Apes.... wait a second)

Again, I thank my small cult band of followers and I look forward to another 10,000 tweets.