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 and strategy. If I wanted to be “professional” – which is to say, if I wanted to identify myself with 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: I use cool technology to help MIT talk to the outside world and the outside world to talk to MIT.

I’m also on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship ^[1], an Associate at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution ^[2], and a former research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School ^[3]. 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. That’s much of what you’ll find here.

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 don’t plan to be. I am essentially an optimist and still believe that the Internet is fundamentally something that can help make the world a better place.