Perpetual Care: Poems and Photos by Susan Eisenberg

Recently, I was asked by CCTV to do a feature on Susan Eisenberg, a poet and photographer affiliated with the Cambridge Women's Commission. Eisenberg's latest project, Perpetual Care, is an installation of photos and poems inspired by her 5-year long battle with multiple chronic illness. It's a thoughtful exploration of the "thin membrane" separating sickness and health, life and death, and the artist's struggle towards a "plan forward" in the face of illness.



Perpetual Care is currently on view at Lesley University's Marran Gallery until March 31. This project is sponsored by The Women's Committee Cancer Project, The Cambridge Women's Commission, and Lesley University.

Share.tv finally went up!

One down, six to go! Share.tv premiered on CCTV tonight on channel 10 and on the internets in front of an audience of at least 15 people.



I'm mentally exhausted-- the show definitely did not go up "without a hitch." There were some gaffs and slip-ups, but we chugged ahead, without there being a moment of dead air. Turn-out was... well, it could have been much better. Noah and I played the entire time, which was something neither of us really wanted to do. As for me, it's really hard to perform on the floor, and serve as a floor director as well.

The point is, I survived. Plus, I'm really excited to make the next episode 100% better than this one. I think my crew is pretty enthusiastic about being part of the project, and their support is what counts.

Pics, video, etc coming up tomorrow afternoon... are up! Check out: hotsocieties.com/share/?page_id=3, otherwise known as the "Gallery" page.

Cool Beans!

Update on the FCC thing: Harlo gets her Whuffies from Vuze.com, Consumerist... (!)

About a day after the event, it was leaked (and then officially confirmed) that Comcast paid people from off of the street to fill seats at the hearing (barring hundreds of dissenters from actually attending). Those people wore yellow highlighters on their clothing to mark them as Comcast shills, and are actually visible from the video I shot.

So, my vid has been picked up and linked to on several blogs that have also covered the event. That makes me feel pretty good! Glad I could help the cause!

The FCC Net Neutrality hearing at Harvard Law

Today, I attended the FCC public hearing on Net Neutrality at Harvard Law School as a videographer for FreePress.net and CCTV. The event provided a pretty excellent opportunity for anyone to learn more about the issue from different perspectives: panelists included Daniel E. Bosley, State Representative of Massachusetts, David Cohen, the executive vice president of Comcast, David Clark, from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and a whole host of other professors, engineers, and policy makers who tried to sway the commission in either one direction or another on the topic.

Here's what I thought were the day's highlights:

There is an upcoming "bandwidth crisis" due to the popularity of video uploading/downloading. And we're not only talking about YouTube: this crisis looms large, especially as the internet is quickly becoming the channel of distribution for TV and film. Also contributing to the crisis are VOiP services and apps that allow for precise synching of live audio and visual data (i.e. the swanky 8-way video conferencing apps big corporations are so fond of...)

The way the ISPs are currently structured is, if you're just surfing the internet while your neighbor is bit-torrenting, you-tubing, or netflixing or something, you're suffering, because he/she is sucking up the available bandwidth on the network. So, according to the talking heads at the ISPs, you should be mad that you're paying the same amount of money as the next person, but are receiving diminished service due to their "abuse" of the network.

So, bearing that in mind, certain ISPs and their proponents propose a tiered internet, where the ISPs limit certain applications from sucking up the resources on the network. Which boils down to everyone having capped access to applications and services (already practiced by some ISPs in a sense: it's called "network management"). And also, the proposed system includes forcing commercial web services to pay premiums to allow the consumer easier access to their sites. So under this system, you'll be able to access YouTube (hopefully), but it'll be a lot slower than, say, Hulu or whatever else NBC is sponsoring. They expect the consumer to chose to patronize the sites that are easiest for them to access-- a fair assumption.

But is this by any means just? No, not quite. When listening to David Cohen, the VP at Comcast, speak, it was quite clear whose interests he had in mind. First off, why does his camp claim the right to impose this new system? Because "competitive broadband providers have responded with massive private investment in broadband infrastructure... with no goverment subsidies, and no assurance of success". So... we owe them a favor? So... we should just lie down and let them restructure the internet after TV's existing (and failing) model?

The anti-neutrality camp was very quick to vilify certain services and apps; those whose very existence pose a great threat to established media conglomerates. Here's his entire testimony before the commission. It's kind of dry, and not much to look at, so I tried to fill the vacuum with shots of audience members with wacky haircuts as well.



YouTube is a threat to the big broadcasters, Skype is a threat to telephone companies, and of course, they all love to jump on BitTorrent's back for being a virtual speakeasy for pirated movies, tv shows, music, and software. Given the ISPs' heavy stake in media distribution, it's only natural that their proposed tiered internet will punish those services who pose the greatest threat. Other engineers and professors testified that there are more reasonable alternatives to tackling this problem, including better network structure, or just basically allowing the consumer to decide which apps or services get priority on their network (which is the idea I like the most).

As for the citizens who were willing to testify for our cameras, a lot of them showed deeper knowledge of the debate than I would have expected. Going into it, I thought I might encounter a lot of people whose main gripe is that they won't be able to download stuff for free. (A prevailing view among many, really!) However, today's group brought up some issues that were both informed and local in scope. One man I interviewed brought an interesting perspective on how these proposed actions would hurt small businesses that rely on e-commerce to keep their overhead costs down. (On a personal note, his daughter runs a small business selling yoga mats over the internet. She wouldn't be able to stay afloat if she had to pay up to make her site as easily accessible as a competitor's with deeper pockets.)



So yeah, exciting stuff! I'm sure there is/will be more coverage all over the internets (including all of the interviews filmed by CCTV, SCAT, and Boston Indy Media on vuze.com), so please check it out if you're interested. Full coverage of the event can be found here at FreePress.net,
and at CCTV, where Susan did a great job making all that information comprehensible!

FCC Hearing on Net Neutrality

FCC Hearing on Net Neutrality
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

I'm at the FCC hearing on net neutrality at Harvard Law School, taking vid on behalf of CCTV and FreePress.net . I am not press, but i did get a nifty pin that gets me into places.