Abstract
Online social networking (OSN) has become of great influence to Filipinos,
where Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram are among the popular
ones. Their popularity, coupled with their intuitive and interactive use, allow
one's personal information such as gender, age, address, relationship status,
and list of friends to become publicly available. The accessibility of
information from these sites allow, with the aid of computers, for the study of
a wide population's characteristics even in a provincial scale. Aside from
being neighbouring locales, the respective residents of Laguna and Batangas
both derive their livelihoods from two lakes, Laguna de Bay and Taal Lake. Both
residents experience similar problems, such as that, among many others, of fish
kill. The goal of this research is to find out similarities in their respective
online populations, particularly that of Facebook's. With the use of
computational dynamic social network analysis (CDSNA), we found out that the
two communities are similar, among others, as follows:
o Both populations are dominated by single young female
o Homophily was observed when choosing a friend in terms of age (i.e.,
friendships were created more often between people whose ages do not differ by
at most five years); and
o Heterophily was observed when choosing friends in terms of gender (i.e.,
more friendships were created between a male and a female than between both
people of the same gender).
This paper also presents the differences in the structure of the two social
networks, such as degrees of separation and preferential attachment.