Digitalization

Digitalization has been a trend for the last two decades and was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.Digital frailty, on the other hand, describes our collective vulnerability to losing stored digital information. Threats to digital archives include technical glitches and switching between file systems. But digital frailty can also be purposeful: ephemeral formats are appealing in the new generation of social media with Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook stories. Planners and local government officials need to make decisions about what planning work should be preserved — such as data to evaluate and monitor programs or to measure plan performance — in addition to the ethical storage and maintenance of this data. For more on the role of digitalization in driving change in communities today, check out the APA report, "Digitalization and Implications for Planning."