Papers

Losing Face: An Environmental Analysis of Privacy on Facebook is a draft (posted for comment) that has been submitted to law reviews for publication (read more here). Losing Face is a heavily revised and refined adaptation of my honors thesis for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Critical Legal Studies Department, which was profiled in the New York Times in the summer of 2009. Losing Face examines the privacy problems of Facebook, develops a conceptual framework to explain what went wrong, and draws upon insights from sociology, behavioral economics, and human-computer interaction to suggest solutions. This is a working paper/draft, not for publication. Please contact me before citing.

WePay: The First Bank of OWS, and Why It Changes Everything. Some thoughts on the role of financial intermediaries in supporting disaggregated political movements.
Facebook, J30Strike, and the Discontents of Algorithmic Dispute Resolution. A comment, from the dispute resolution angle, on the civic censorship controversy originally posted here and here, as well as picked up by MotherJones. Originally appeared on the NCTDR website.
Nobody Knows What Google+ Is Yet. And That’s Awesome. Some early thoughts on how Google plus might be like – or unlike – its apparent competitors in the social media space.
Gladwell’s “Small Change” Misses The Mark. Some thoughts on Malcolm Gladwell’s rejection of social media as being politically meaningful.
Mapping Banned Books. Announcing the launch of the Mapping Banned Books Project. Originally posted to the Unabashedly Bookish weblog, archived locally here.
In Praise Of [Some] DDoSs? An exploration of how we calibrate punishment based on the political or moral character of an action, and whether we should do the same for acts of hacktivism.
Saving With Shoeboxes: An Open Letter To My Bank. A reflection on some behavioral economics research into the creation of meaningful mental taxonomies of assets and its implications for online banking.

Update: see also In Search of Shoeboxes: Goodbye BoA, Hello ING!

What’s In A (User) Name? Facebook’s Contribution to Online Dispute Creation. Coauthored with Professor Ethan Katsh of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, this short piece briefly describes some of the potential benefits and drawbacks of the new Facebook Username system from an online dispute resolution perspective.

Defending the Banned Books Map. A rebuttal of Mitchell Muncy’s attack on the Banned Books Map. Originally published on Thursday, October 1, in the Wall Street Journal.
In Re: Only Mr God Knows Why. A letter to the editor about Eurovision and Epic Sax Guy. Originally published in the Letters to the Editor section of The New Yorker, June 2010.

Chris Peterson