---
title: "Project: Digital Information Dilemmas"
units: [Digital Information]
summary: Digital information causes benefits and harms.
weight: 120
days: 2
---

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## Today's Objectives
- Analyze an article about information digitization to determine the information being digitized and the initial goal or purpose.
- Argue whether the digitization of information has broadly speaking improved or damaged society.
- Examine articles to identify the social benefits and harms caused by information digitization.
- Weigh social benefits or harms from a specific instance of information digitization.

## Lesson Overview
### What have I learned so far?
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You have learned:

- Some technical challenges and questions that arise from the need to represent digital information in computers
- How complex information like numbers, text, images, and sound are represented in bits
- How compression works
- The broader social impacts of digitizing the world's information

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## Assignment
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### Digital Information Dilemmas
Choose one of the following Wikipedia articles to read:

- [Virtual actor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_actor)
- [DNA digital data storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage)

Based on the article you chose, record your answers to the following questions:

- What was digitized?
- What was the goal or purpose of digitizing this thing?
- Is someone benefiting from this situation? If so, who?
- Is someone being harmed in this situation? If so, who?
- Are these impacts intended or unintended? How do you know?

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