Taking a New Spotlight to the Prom: Youth Culture and Its Emerging Video Archive

Among the traditional rituals of American high school, the prom stands out as an event that evokes intense emotions, expectations, and memories among participants. However, it is not only teenagers who attend the prom; teachers, extended families, and townspeople become heavily invested in the elaborate spectacle. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, many proms began to include showy "arrivals" (perhaps a throwback to the cotillions and debutante balls from which the prom tradition emerged), with couples parading in their finery for an appreciative audience before entering the dance. A new tradition has emerged in which spectators gaze and applaud from bleachers as the kids run a glamorous gauntlet, suggestive of Hollywood red-carpet galas. Around 2005, public involvement with the prom was taking on a new dimension, as local cable access television began airing videos of these "arrivals," providing material for repeated viewing and heightening the parallels to other mass media or celebrity events. Furthermore, televised videos were incorporating preprom "fashion shows" and party scenes as well as the dance itself, and some videos also featured a running commentary on the teenagers' appearances. By 2007, such videos were flourishing in the medium of Internet video-sharing sites such as YouTube. com. The new age of participatory media has turned the prom into a fast-emerging vehicle for teenagers' self-conscious displays of stylized drama. A Historical Perspective on Prom as Ritual The prom emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a college phenomenon, as described by Karal Ann Marling in her 2004 book Debutante: Rites and Regalia of American Debdom: "The prom worked its way down from college to the high school by gradual increments: a tea dance in one's Sunday best in the early 1900s, a class banquet with dancing and party clothes in the 1920s and 1930s, and proms proper in the 1940s. During the affluent 1950s, proms became more and more formal- that is, expensive and elaborate - thanks in part to the media coverage of debutantes and their doings" (Marling 173). The prom became a middle-class ritual originally intended to emulate the deluxe trappings of grand debutante balls; the term prom denoted "promenade," the guests' formal march into the ballroom. In the 1950s, proms began to take place in fancy hotels and banquet halls, moving beyond the high school gym. While the antiestablishment sentiment of the 1960s put a slight damper on the prom's popularity in that decade, the conservative 1980s saw a revival and flourishing of the tradition (Vitello). Throughout its evolution over the years, the American high school prom has been thought to belong to youth (often in contestation with school officials). While proms are sponsored by their host institutions, the participants are liminal: not really students, not yet alumni; no longer children, not yet adults. The prom has always been a moment of great social pressure, not unlike another annual rite of passage, New Year's Eve. Boys and girls alike feel enormous peer pressure to have a date, to have the right date, to look gorgeous or cool. For many, the prom has been an occasion when one was expected to lose one's virginity - a major passage into adulthood. Of course, the performances and experiences of these rituals throughout America are susceptible to many variables, including participants' age (junior prom/senior prom); gender (the pressures on males and females, though similar, vary); race and ethnicity (sometimes involving segregation); the social mores of the particular region or school with regard to sexual expression, apparel, and gender identification; and social and economic status. The class markers of the prom now go beyond adornments (such as shoes or jewelry) and limousines, and include recording devices to immortalize the moment. The purpose here is not to attempt to analyze a particular demographic of young people, but rather to shed light on some major changes that have infiltrated the prom along with those recording devices. …