When analyzing young people’s media projects, it is easy to get excited about “youth voice” as a site of free expression and social critique. Tempting as this is, media scholars, as well as young producers and adult mentors, note the varied, often contradictory, voices and interests at play within youth videos, photography exhibitions, and other media experiments. Here, I focus on a specific manifestation of multivocality in youth media discourse. That is, heavy use of “reported speech,” a linguistic term to describe moments of interaction in which speakers quote, paraphrase, or otherwise invoke other people’s words. Young media producers use reported speech in striking ways to negotiate authority over their own projects, animating an interactive process
I call “crowded talk,” with implications for multiliteracy theory and practice.
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