Small world?

Last week I traveled to Philadelphia for my first American Thanksgiving, and had a few adventures in New York along the way.
I was supposed to arrive in downtown New York at 9:00pm, the get a cab across to a different station for a 9:40 bus. Of course my first bus was 2 and a half hours late, so I was stuck in Manhattan at 11:30 at night... (there is eventually a point to all this)
A high school friend of my Canadian roommate (a fellow rower) is at Columbia, so I followed his directions to get across town to him (on a cellphone that had been flashing "low battery" for about an hour. The charger, naturally, was still in my room on campus.) Once at Columbia, I went out with Sam (my roommate's friend) and met a bunch of Aussies on Columbia's crew team. While it wasn't like running into a group of Kiwis, it was still good to wind them up about the Rugby World Cup earlier this year (New Zealand won), and hear a non-rhotic r and "mate" splattered liberally throughout every sentence. Then it turned out one of the guys knew an old coach of mine (the coach had spent some time at the University of Melbourne.) And then it came up the some of the Aussies were from Yale, and were paying the Columbia Aussies a visit. So of course the Yale boys knew Harry, a guy on their team from my club back home, and then of course one of them had recently hosted my good mate on his official recruit visit to Yale. It's a small world eh?
It was a succession of fascinating links, and, stuck in the massive, intimidating New York, I began to wonder how big my world really is. Does digital communication media allow us to patch together a kind of community that can fill what the urban lacks? It felt like I had wandered from home, but only into a suburb that looked just like my own home.
How easy do you think it would be, if you showed up in a foreign city, to find people quite like yourself, who know some of the same people? A few texts to the friend of a friend? How do you think a mobile, or facebook, changes the effects of urban alienation? Are you creating a different sort of cyber city-space among your connections?


Riordan