Day Three: A Small(er) World.

The cheerily insufferable mantra of Walter E. Disney's animatronic progeny turned out to be pretty prescient, after all.

It's a small world, indeed. And thanks to glorious, glorious modern technology (namely, the iPhone), it's getting smaller by the day, it seems.

Today as I perused Amoeba Records (quite possibly the greatest record store in the known universe), I got a text message from my good friend Austin. Austin is in Africa, shooting a documentary film with a missions organization. Over the course of his six-week trip, we've been able to stay in touch via text messages and Facebook.

Now in Johannesburg, South Africa, without wi-fi, and in need of some time-sensitive passport-related information, Austin texted me to ask if I would do some Googling and track down the info for him.

So, with a half-dozen CDs and LPs still in hand, I moved to a less-trafficked section of the store (the World section--fitting, no?), and spent the next 20 minutes or so looking up the information on my iPhone. I fired the info back to Johannesburg; Austin and I volleyed a few texts back and forth, and I returned to my session of vinyl therapy, glad to have been able to help my buddy out.

In that instant, I was struck by how very cool--how very 21st century--this scenario was. By how unlikely this would have seemed even just two or three years ago, much less how utterly unimaginable it would've been a mere fifteen years ago. Technology has advanced to the point now where neither cost nor location are prohibitive in trans-global communications.

Sure, we've had e-mail, AIM, Skype, Facebook, etc for a while now. But in 2008, I'm no longer tethered to even my laptop. I can be out shopping--shopping!--converse with a friend halfway around the world via text messages (which, since Austin's is a domestic number, I'm assuming won't cost me anything extra--it had better not), and track down pertinent information from sources in several other places around the world.

All while deciding if I should buy the new Annuals album or go with the significantly marked-down Sufjan Christmas box set from a few years ago. (My solution: get 'em both. For the economy's sake.)