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.
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.
Seriously, though, MIT is an amazing place to be. In my life I've attended or worked at public schools and private schools; schools in cities and schools in the sticks; schools with sterling international reputations for brilliance and schools with sterling international reputations for rioting. But I've never been anywhere quite like MIT. The character of the campus community is truly unique - supported by a robust intelligence and animated by a thrumming trickster spirit. Where else can you get up from your desk, walk past Woodie Flowers' office to cross the street for the best burrito in Boston helpfully irradiated by the local nuclear reactor? Where else can you leave your exhausting research at the Labratory for Chocolate Science and run to catch your friends for a round of underwater hockey, a game which combines the thrilling rush of hypoxia with the club rave psychedelia of swallowing dissolved lead? It's an awesome place to work, an incredible place to live, and I'm ecstatic to be a part of it.
As for the rest of my life: I’m also an on-again, off-again researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society as well as an Associate at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. 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. 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 and I'm not ashamed of my grandma basket. I am essentially an optimist and still believe that the Internet is fundamentally something that can help make the world a better place. RSS feed for my blog
