Patterns of Internet-Based Friendship Among Residents of Los Baños, Laguna: The Friendster Case
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CONTRIBUTORS:
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JOURNAL:
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YEAR:
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2008
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PUB TYPE:
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Journal Article
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SUBJECT(S):
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demography; Internet; friend-of-a-friend network; small-world; scale-free
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DISCIPLINE:
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Sociology
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HTTP:
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http://www.ics.uplb.edu.ph/node/279
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LANGUAGE:
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English
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PUB ID:
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103-444-125
(Last edited on
2008/07/19 02:08:40 GMT-6)
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SPONSOR(S):
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ABSTRACT:
The prevalent use of the street lingo “Friendster” to refer to a friend is evidence that the Internet has become a pervasive entity that influences Filipinos. Because the Internet has become an ubiquitous medium for faceless and remote social interaction via services called social networking, data such as gender, geographic location, age and a person's list of friends have become readily available, making it possible to analyze on a community-scale the demography and the friendship characteristics of a population, without resorting to the traditional procedure of surveying a population sample. We developed a computer program that extracted the demographic and friendship data of 7,172 Friendster™ members whose listed hometown is Los Baños, Laguna. Based on our demographic analysis, we found that:
1. There are more female participants (52.34%) than male (47.66%);
2. Ages 15-25 of both genders compose 68% of the participants, with ages 26-40 following at 28%, ages 41-85 at 4%, and senior citizens (64-85) at 1%;
3. The birds-of-a-feather adage (i.e., homophily) is observed in age level preference such that the members are strongly biased towards being friends with people of a similar age; And
4. There is heterophily in gender preference such that friendship among individuals of the opposite gender occurs more often.
Based on our network analysis, we found that:
1. The friendship network is well-connected and robust to node removal;
2. It exhibits a small-world characteristic with an average path length of 4.5 (maximum=12) among connected members, shorter than the well-known “six degrees of separation” finding by Travers and Milgram in 1969; And
3. The network exhibits a scale-free characteristics with heavily-tailed power-law distribution (power = -1.02 and R2 = 0.84) suggesting the presence of many members acting as the network hubs.
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