Qué perfección: Complimenting Behaviour among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram

Placencia’s contribution to the volume complements Eslami et al.’s chapter in that it looks at compliments exchanged on Instagram, a social networking site aimed explicitly at sharing pictures. The study analyzes comments on solo shots posted by older Ecuadorian teenage girls over a period of 12 months, and the interpretation of the responses is backed up with informal interviews. The pictures analyzed by Placencia serve as invitations for positive assessment, and it is argued that the complimenters compete with each other to offer the most original ‘gift’ in the form of a compliment. Their creativity is conveyed through lexical choices, use of irony, mock impoliteness, and macho talk with sexual connotations (used in jest). The compliments are characterized by exaggeration and high emotional involvement, expressed through different means. They tend to be brief, with a strong reliance on ellipsis and pictorial forms. The affordances of the medium contribute to the multimodal character of the compliments, reflected in the use of emojis, prosodic orthography, and hashtags, linking the compliments with images.