RootsRadio is a platform for the relocalization of communities. It’s inspired by my high school friends and my need not only to keep in touch with them, but also keep growing with them.
Ultimately, the sites not really about telling the story, it’s about making sure there is a story; that the characters aren’t just drifting out of the frame. It’s about treating our lives with the recognition that we’re all living the same story we were living when we were 14.
Often it seems that we look at our journey as a series of episodes, chapters. And we even grow up with our lives incremented into grades with the premise of graduation. And while there is value in moving on, leaving things behind, I find we rarely are able to hold on to the things that were most important to us, namely our relationships.
Current social media seems to miss the real power of connection. It’s all too instant, and while it’s good to live in the moment, we’re really missing the meat of it. We’re not feeling the social network, we’re just hearing the noise.
The idea is to keep the roots intact, because when you do that, you can grasp the full extent of the blossom, see the branches for the tree, and begin to look at something beautiful.
The power of the project will ultimately lie in its ability to realize a send of local, unique story-space, and for this site to work, I need to figure out how to successfully facilitate the local spaces universally. The way I have the site set up currently, it functions as a document archive as well as a more dynamic space for reunion. The key will be to merge the interface so that the two are easily navigable, if not indistinguishable, and the site can grow organically in the image of the story it tells.
The major issues I ran into, and continue to run into are concerned with participation. Although people want to contribute, it often takes a push to get them to take the step. I implemented a browser-based camera to try to streamline the process, but its still lacking in the instant gratification of seeing your video appear. Once that’s implemented the site will be a little more ready to go but what I really need is ability for any user to take ownership of the project.
Right now, my vision is to do this through an opportunity to create a moment. Clearly, the site will be too cluttered if anybody can create at any time so I think there needs to be some sort of sign-up, cycling system where people are given the chance to create a moment with a prompt of their choosing. This would also solve the problem of keeping the site self-sustaining.
My final vision for the site spans the entirety of a life, really. I want to be able to look at the site and see moments of our 60’s in the context of moments in our 30’s. I want to achieve a living record that there will always be real people with hopes and dreams who cared about each other, who’s lives begun and ended in exactly the same way.
RootsRadio is a way for people to touch upon a sense of deeper meaning and timelessness, immortality even, I suppose.