What is “pebling”, this new teen love language? | EUROtoday
C ‘is a heterogeneous gallery: movies of cuddly and malicious puppies, the newest trendy clips, saturated photographs of dream seashores, the viral scenes of profitable collection … Agathe is 17 years outdated, she is a 12 months of terminal. Like most younger individuals her age, she spends lengthy hours on social networks day-after-day. And, like a lot of them, she communicates there together with her boyfriend. “Sometimes we send something and we say nothing more!” »Confides the younger girl, whereas she scroll by the resolutely visible thread of their Instagram dialog.
And to elucidate the strategy: “Sharing all of this is a way of saying to yourself that you are thinking of the other, of making it smile. “Indeed, if the content material is chosen, she enlightens, it’s nonetheless the need to manifest himself that predominates. And to evoke, tacitly, widespread tastes, joyful reminiscences, or desires nonetheless tus by the reserve. “Each message has a meaning, it is not chosen at random or sent without thinking,” says the highschool pupil. The sea, for instance, it is as a result of we find it irresistible each and we wish to go collectively … “
Subtle content, carefully chosen
Photos, videos, memes, gif, clips … Like Agathe and her boyfriend, there are many today (especially among the youngest) to fuck, over the day and via private messages, digital attentions. A practice so widespread that it has a name: “pebling”, reference to the ritual observed by certain species of penguins and consisting in offering pebbles (“pebbles”) to testify to their interest in the other. A term used “for a very long time” in the neuro-divider community, underlined the American magazine Psychology Today in a recent article devoted to the subject.
“” Pebbling “can assist present somebody what you’re feeling, along with or substitute the phrases,” wrote the author. A language of subtle love, today widely shared. Where various attentions take the exclusive form of digital content, but whose objective remains: to say its affection and maintain, if not strengthen, the link. “We observe it basically within the romantic relationship, but additionally between sure greatest mates,” notes Catherine Lejealle, doctor of sociology, specialist in digital uses and professor at ISC Paris.
Paying attention that it distinguishes from the message “multidistine” and “impersonal” (to be gleaned here and there) from which our WhatsApp groups are full. “With” Pebbling “, the sender addresses a rigorously chosen content material, and supposed for a selected particular person,” says the specialist. Who sees it, above all, a powerful way to reaffirm the relationship. “This apply mobilizes three temporalities: the previous (we manifest what we now have realized and retained from the opposite), the current (we reactivate the reminiscence with him/from her) and the long run (we count on a response, if not a” donation against don ” – lengthy -term inscribed on the coronary heart of the social ties). »»
A brand new grammar
“We answer ourselves most of the time with a heart or an inch in the air,” explains Agathe, whose boyfriend is “at least as much, if not more”, gained by apply. “He does it no less than as soon as a day. »A use of which social platforms and content material creators shortly seized, the primary inviting to” share “the posts of their customers when the latter endeavor to create hashtags (#relationships) and different content material completely devoted to broadcast: “Send this image to the person with whom you want to go on vacation”; “Share this video with the friend to whom she reminds you” …
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
“As we know, platforms (Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat …) have largely promoted the image,” recollects Catherine Lejealle. And movies, memes, photographs and different montages “are now the privileged narrative format of young people”. “Sometimes I have the impression of expressing more things by sending a nice video than writing to him that I miss it,” abounds Agathe, who doesn’t use messages any much less when she “widowed[t] say it ”. A grammar that also, gently, adopted previous generations. “My mom, 80, additionally sends many photographs to her grandchildren,” says Catherine Lejealle. She understood that it was their way of communicating. »»
Any use of words that could be deplored. Except to recall that the “pebling” does not replace (completely) for private messages, SMS and other vocals – still largely acclaimed by the youngest. And to consider “how a lot he requires funding”: “the” pebling “can provide rise to a very long time of analysis to search out” the “content material that may contact”, underlines the specialist. And to bring it closer to very previous practices: “It is, principally, an train fairly just like that of the design of personalised cassettes that we provided to be beloved within the Nineteen Seventies.” Or “small attentions” which adapt to the technique of their time.
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/qu-est-ce-que-le-pebbling-ce-nouveau-langage-d-amour-des-ados-17-05-2025-2589793_23.php