Chris Peterson

My name is Chris Peterson. I think about and work with Internet technologies and how they affect human communication and behavior.

My full time gig is at MIT, where I work on web communications, outreach, and strategy for MITAdmissions.org. If I wanted to be “professional” – which is to say, if I wanted to obscure my individual unimportance behind interlocking bulkheads of buzzwords, like a pufferfish wrapped in chain mail and festooned with mines – I would say that I leverage social software to facilitate digital conversations between MIT and its latent global community. In English, that means I use cool technology to help MIT talk to prospective students and prospective students talk to MIT.

I’m also a sometimes researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, as well as an Associate at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. In these capacities I spend a lot of time reading and writing and thinking about the Internet and how it impacts the way we all communicate and experience our lives. Sometimes this includes really interesting things, like how democracy activists use Twitter to promote freedom overseas. Sometimes this includes really lame things, like pretty much everything else about Twitter.

In my free time I like to read about politics and policy; play guitar and attend poetry slams; and spend time in the New England woods from whence I came. I am allergic to cats and cat macros. I bike to work when I can. I’m not yet important enough to write about myself in the third person and I hope I never am. I am essentially an optimist and still believe that the Internet is fundamentally something that can help make the world a better place.