Chris Peterson

Though born in Massachusetts, I grew up in the wintry hinterlands of Vermont and New Hampshire. In Vermont, for instance, I lived in the Burlington area, which averages a bit over five feet of snow every year. While that number isn't actually that high by comparison to the coastal cities, the difference between Burlington and Boston is that in Boston the snow will melt, whereas in Burlington it never does, so towards the end of the year you actually have several feet of snow that serves as a sort of composite history of the year's blizzards. In New Hampshire, up in the White Mountains, we spent every New Years outside by a 64 square foot bonfire, usually on couches carved out in the snowdrifts, with the champagne freezing in the bottle on several occasions.

Cambridge is more or less the furthest south I've ever lived (except for one year I spent as an undergrad at the College of William and Mary before swiftly transferring) so when other people are freezing I'm basking in the comparative mildness of the winter. You have to know how to dress for the cold. A few simple rules - cover your head (tons of heat escapes off your scalp); clog your collar (ditto for your core); and cotton kills (NEVER wear cotton in the cold - opt for wool or fleece instead) and you'll be fine. One day, during my junior year of high school, class was cancelled on account of a -60F (that's -51C) wind chill. A few friends and I bundled up and traipsed around the woods shooting fireworks at Jewel Trolls.

Ah, youth.

Why am I posting about all of this?

Well, winter's finally come to Cambridge, along with the rest of the East Coast, with the Blizzard of 2009. This snowstorm dumped up to 20" of snow all up and down the seaboard, including record totals of 30"+ in some areas of New York. Boston was the storm's last stand before it spun off to the sea. A cold, dry air mass from Canada blanketed northern New England and insulated it from the ravages of the storm. It's pretty wild actually. I spent last weekend in Boston and Northampton MA and the Nashua area of NH. Despite being very close to one another, the totals were tremendously different:

View Snowfall, MA in a larger map

Most students are home for the holidays, but a few sent me photos of campus the night they left, and I took some on my way into work this morning. They're just cellphone photos, nothing particularly beautiful or exciting, but if you're from the lower latitudes or an international student, and thus unfamiliar with a snowy campus, here's a little bit of the weekend for you:

(You can find more posts about MIT in the snow and winter here)

On Wednesday, I'll be leaving on my winter break from work, spending a few precious days with family and friends before devoting the next four months of my life to reading regular action applicants. I can't wait to get back up north and start skiing with my family at my favorite ski mountain where I once worked in high school. And if you find yourself here next winter, and in need of some ways to stay warm or the best places to carve some powder, just drop me a line, an ol' Papa Petey will fix you right up.

One of the great things about working at MIT is that you have some incredible opportunities available to you. Soon after I started working here, I was approached by MIT student Paul Kominers. In addition to being brilliant, Paul is also hilarious, and is what we call a “glue” kid – the sort of person who really makes things happen, who glues a community together, etc.

Paul is involved in the administration of SPLASH. Here is the Splash description:

One weekend in November, thousands of students of all types flood to MIT just for ESP’s Splash program to learn anything they want. From fractal fun to Hungarian history to aircraft analysis, Splash participants are introduced to a huge variety of topics by over 400 classes taught by teachers from the MIT community. Want to take a class on Egyptian mythology? Origami? Chemical sensors? All are possible.

Over the course of 20 hours during Splash, you can get your feet wet with a short introduction to any number of subjects—things you always wanted to learn, or topics you never knew existed. Or you can dive head first into an in-depth seminar or intensive workshop. The whole thing happens over the course of two intense days on the MIT campus, with classes taught by MIT students and community members.

On this Saturday past, I spent two hours teaching 130 10th-12th graders about the privacy architecture of Facebook. It was a lot of fun. Bunch of great jokes, sharp kids, cool concepts that were mostly interesting and new to them. Caught Paul running around with a top hat on, making sure everything went as planned for all of the 2700+ local students who were attending dozens of classes.

Great opportunity, lots of fun, and I can’t wait to do it again.

Just stumbled across this nice shoutout about my thesis from last summer. A good analysis from Henry Jones of Sun.

It was nice to see it pass the muster of an expert in the social and computer sciences, and gave me some good stuff to think about going forward.

I’ve been swamped with work at work, but soon I’ll be posting the “final” draft of my thesis Article just before I ship it off to law reviews. And I’ll be teaching a class at MIT SPLASH this weekend, which should be fun too.

I remember the first time I ever heard of Facebook. I was donning my cap and gown and preparing to walk at my high school graduation. Pomp and Circumstance bellowed off the bricks nearby. Over the din, a friend shouted that his older brother had something called The Face Book, and that "everyone was in it."

His brother was a meaty metalhead (and consequently a personal hero of mine) so I figured it was some sort of creepy cultish leather tome with yellowed pages and predictions about how each one of us would inevitably meet our untimely, grisly demise. I was wrong - that was Craigslist. But, like so many cripplingly insecure and regularly unwashed college freshman boys, I joined it anyway, and it soon changed - even became - my life.

This was ages ago - long before the first Rick had ever been Rolled - and it was a very different website then. There were no photos, no groups, and no messages - just a profile picture, interests, and a wall. Students could not friend students at other colleges. In fact, most colleges weren't on Facebook. In retrospect, it was a primitive and dim space to socialize, not unlike a hipster bar in an NYC bomb shelter, or Olympic Stadium in Montreal (poor Youppi!).

It's been a little over four years since then. And though I still can't grow a decent beard, oh how the times have changed!

Facebook now has over 300 million members. Over 80 billion photos have been uploaded, and over 600,000 are viewed every minute. Brody Ruckus has given way to Billabong. Like a scruffy college graduate who has somehow managed to bluff his way into a real job, Facebook has hit the big time, and now actually gets taken seriously.

And for good reason too. All organizations - profit or nonprofit, private or public - require human capital to produce their goods or spread their message. We're all people powered, and sites like Facebook are our cold fusion. When asked why he robbed banks, diminutive miscreant Willie Sutton replied "because that's where the money is." Well, organizations love Facebook (and other social network sites) because that's where the people are.

So starting today, you'll see a "Share on Facebook" link at the bottom of every blog entry. By clicking this link, you may choose to publish the article to the News Feed of your five thousand closest Friends on Facebook. Everybody wins. Your Friends will see cool content they may have never stumbled across otherwise. You get to be the dude or dudette who provides the hook-up. And we get to spread our message to people who might otherwise never have seen it.

That's why they call it "social media" - because it is animated by and conducted within our preexisting social circles. But within this promise of social media lies its peril.

We know that even if you love MIT, you may not want MIT to be where your friends are, jumping in where it is isn't wanted like that awkward kid in high school who invited himself over to your house and would let himself in and begin eating your Cheetos while loudly criticizing your Tekken techniques. And we want to respect your wishes, even if you ARE a certifiable moron for going with the Armor King over Ganryu.

But it's not that simple, because we don't know what your wishes are. Some studies show that prospective students prefer for school to contact them via Facebook. Others suggest that students prefer email for these sorts of inquiries, and would like for Spam U. to let them Farmville in peace. We also know that different students use different social spaces online, and that no one site represents all the students we might like to speak with.

The best way for MIT to achieve the potential of these social sites is for y'all to guide us around their pitfalls. Our new "Share" links are relatively unproblematic and uncontroversial, and I hope you will use them (perhaps even on this post!) However, as we move forward, we'll be looking to you (collectively) for guidance. What social spaces do you use when you're thinking about, researching, or discussing college applications? What social activities or practices (apps, chats, pages, etc) would you like to see more of? Would you play an MIT Farmville or Mafia Wars, and would you share it with your friends who'd never thought of MIT because they'd find it fun too?

I actually do believe in viral marketing, which is to say that I believe promotions can be as fun to experience as they are effective at messaging. But here at the Admissions Office, we're all (sadly, even myself) old fogeys, and the only "hip" thing for us is the prosthetic kind. So tell me, what could we create in the crowdsourced Web 2.0 blogosphere networked public buzzword universe that would be fun, educational, and social for you?

Soon after the WSJ article criticizing the Banned Books Map, I was approached by one of the administrators of the Barnes & Noble Unabashedly Bookish blog community. He wanted me to write about my experiences setting up the map, what I had wanted, and what I thought I could achieve.

The article is now up (and reproduced below the fold). Furthermore, I have a special announcement:

Today, I’m launched the Mapping Banned Books project. As you can read below, the project intends to create a grassroots, ground-up documentation of all the book bans and challenges that go on in the U.S. today. The website is still under heavy development – I’m rolling this out very quickly – but please, check it out, contribute what you can, and help us along the way. I’ll have more in the next few days.

(continue reading…)

The Grey Ladyruns a profile on our MIT Admissions site. Great read – glad they did it.

I’m thinking a lot about this banned books project. More to come in the next few days.

As I mentioned, last week the Wall Street Journal published a really exceptionally stupid critique of a) the ALA, b) Banned Books Week, and c) the Google Map of Banned Books that I created with Alita Edelman from ABFFE’s records of book bans and challenges.

I contacted their letters editor, who today ran an edited version of my rebuttal bookended by a lengthier piece from the President of the ALA. Because their letters page is impermanent, I’m posting the full thing here below the fold.
(continue reading…)

And with it, the LA Times features our “Mapping Banned Books” mashup. The Lake County Record-Bee had a nice piece too, as did trueslant, the School Library Journal, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and The Nation.

I am, of course, devastated that the WSJ doesn’t think too highly of it. But I suppose you can’t please everyone.

If you want to celebrate Banned Books Week in style, please feel free to check out the eponymous website and, as IO9 advocates, do your part by filling your head with subversive filth today!

My name is Chris Peterson. My title - all Serious People have titles, and I am nothing if not Serious - is Admissions Counselor for Web Communications at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, like Dave, perhaps it is simpler to introduce myself as part of the team of people that have joined together like a Megazord to become the new Ben. I don't recall much about the process, but I seem to remember it as going something like this:

(dramatic simulation - actual results may vary)

As one of the constitutive elements of this new borg-Ben newly arisen from the digital ooze, my job is to help make the Internet go for the Admissions Office. 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. If I wanted to be truthful, I'd say I try to use cool technology to help MIT and prospective students talk to each other.

This blog is a huge part of that effort. It's fairly incredible that MIT allows both current and prospective students to converse openly as they do on this site. It is perhaps unsurprising that MIT jumped aboard the cluetrain in this regard - to paraphrase Matt McGann, Tim Berners-Lee does work upstairs, and if we didn't use the web as a way to freely share information he'd probably whack us upside the head - but it is no less unique for that. The fact of the matter is that MIT could survive without this blog and avoid a lot of potential headaches and most of my salary. However, the Institvte recognizes that conversations bring communities together, and so here we are, sharing our hopes and dreams through wires and screens and it's awesome enough that I'll even put up with Dave's lolcats to be a part of that vision.

One thing I'd like to do is figure out some shiny new toys to add to the already shiny site we have here. Dave and I are working on some Top Secret web projects that we'll be rolling out in the indefinite future, projects that will help the entire MIT community (past, current, and prospective) share its considerable collective intelligence and enrich all involved. In the tradition of a true webitocracy, if anyone has any ideas about cool tools or features they'd like to see incorporated into the website, please post something about it and why you think it rocks. Time permitting and FSM willing, we'll see if we can work it in.

I can't wait to work with all of you to continue to build what Ben began: an intergalactic space empire run by an alien witch living in a dumpster on the moon a first-class online community for some of the best and brightest students in the world.