Cultural milestones

Borders' Books flagship store in downtown Ann Arbor

In ways big and small, the odometer of life rolls along.

-- Seemingly half a lifetime ago, I arrived in Ann Arbor in the late summer of 1983 to begin a yearlong fellowship at the University of Michigan. In the days before the fall semester began, I had ample time to explore the city and made the most excellent discovery: Borders bookstore.

With its sidewalk tables of heavily discounted books and wealth of other merchandise inside, it became a place I visited regularly. From that flagship location, Borders expanded into a national behemoth, with nearly 400 stores, including 10 in Oregon. So I was saddened by this week's news that Borders Group is going out of business.

I'm not in a position to second-guess the company's business decisions about expansion and debt. But I can react viscerally to the loss of a chain of bookstores that, to me, signals another troubling step away from reading. Yes, consumer tastes are changing, helped along by the advent of e-readers, but my gut tells me that Borders' closing represents more than just a shift to Kindles and Nooks and iPads.

-- On Wednesday, I sent out my 200th tweet. It was an innocuous reply to a fellow staffer at The Oregonian, publicly thanking her for tweeting about me and two co-workers who manage the hyperlocal public blogs on OregonLive.com. If you don't understand that sentence, I'm not surprised. Twitter is a whole new world, where communication occurs in bursts of 140 characters or less, helped along by URL-shorteners like bitly.com and tinyurl.com.

In the transformation from print to online journalism, I've had to acquire a new vocabulary and new skills in order to navigate intelligently in cyberspace -- or in what my colleague, Cornelius Swart, calls the changing and ever-evolving "news ecosystem." Getting out there on Twitter is just one of the ways of engaging in new ways with readers, writers and friends. At this point, @georgerede has 287 followers. I'm following 214 people and organizations and I've sent 202 tweets.

Here's No. 201: Never too late to tweet this: Cornelia Welch persevered when facing words that stung, eyes that failed | OregonLive.com. http://bit.ly/nCrYVe

Photograph: wikipedia.org