“Just click ‘Like”’: Computer-mediated responses to Spanish compliments

Abstract

Research on compliments has demonstrated that responding to compliments is far from easy since it entails a clash between the politeness maxims of agreement and modesty. The question that arises is what happens when communication does not take place face-to-face but is computer-mediated and the contextual conditions are markedly different. The aim of this paper is to answer this question by analyzing computer-mediated responses to compliments in Spanish as opposed to their face-to-face counterparts. It is hypothesized that the different contextual conditions will have a core role to play in how interlocutors respond to compliments in computer-mediated communication, more concretely in a social network like Facebook, where compliments are pervasive. Data have been analyzed from a netnographic and systemic functional approach and supplemented by semi-structured interviews with eight of the participants. Results show that aspects such as disembodiment, asynchronicity or relative lack of privacy have a crucial say in how online users respond to compliments; leading both to a simplification of some face-to-face strategies and the amplification of others and resulting in a whole different system of responses.