Qué perfección : Complimenting Behaviour among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram

Book synopsis: Instagram has been described as the visual version of Twitter and its popularity among young people is attributed to the ease with which it allows them to express themselves (J. Stein in McDermott, 2014), enabling users to assert their individuality. Positive evaluation of peers’ pictures or other postings, along the same lines, enables teenage (and other) users to affirm each other’s identity and self-worth. How this is done is the object of analysis of this paper with reference to peer evaluation among a group of Ecuadorian (Quito) teenage girls of an upper-socio-economic background. Evaluation in this context takes the form of compliments that the teenage girls give each other on the pictures they post of themselves. More specifically, the paper aims to give a snapshot of such behaviour based on a corpus of compliments and the responses that they elicit. While the results show some commonalities with other studies on complimenting behaviour in Spanish and English, the study identifies more creativity or less formulaicity than in other studies on compliments in (Ecuadorian) Spanish. On the other hand, it shows that new formulas suited for the online medium seem to be emerging. It also identifies the use of piropos or compliments with a sexual tone (cf. Achugar 2001) among the teenagers. This use, which should not to be taken at face-value, is a kind of appropriation of traditionally male talk, possibly employed as an intensification device among the teenage girls.