ABSTRACT
Part of becoming literate in digital ethics requires understanding the nature of the digital, and its ethical implications. This chapter introduces the first property of the digital we identify as having important implications for digital ethics: distributedness. Through thinking about the speed and scope of digital information we argue that distributedness is a function of two attributes of the digital: reproducibility and transferability. We unpack these two concepts and argue that they shift the ways we think about agency, privacy, and ownership in the digital. We use three real-world examples to frame these shifts.
