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

•We contrast face-to-face and online response to compliments in Peninsular Spanish.•Different contextual conditions affect online responses dramatically.•A new whole system of compliment response can be established.•This shows changing patterns in interlocutors pragmatic behavior.

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.