If you happen to pay attention to public health, diet or urban planning news, you’ve probably become familiar with the adjective “obesogenic,” which is commonly used to refer to how much of the North American built environment makes it hard for people to lose excess weight and easy for them to gain it. For example, neighbourhoods where it’s unsafe or unpleasant to walk due to lack of sidewalks or adequate lighting, busy traffic, or sprawling buildings are considered obesogenic, as are those filled with restaurants selling ultra-processed fast foods but few grocery stores where you can buy a fresh vegetable. Obesogenic can also refer to foods or behaviours that lead to or encourage obesity.

The first use of obesogenic was in a 1983 academic article in the Journal of Physiology and Behaviour according to the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

While I’m not familiar with the evolution of the scholarship in this field, I’m willing to bet that the introduction and eventual common use of this word were tied to a shift in how researchers viewed obesity and its prevalence in North America from seeing it as a problem resulting mainly from individual behaviour to recognizing the broader societal contributing factors as well, e.g., factors such as how our food supply is created and regulated, as well as how our neighbourhoods are. Without getting into the many and complicated debates about the causes of and solutions to obesity or the role of personal responsibility versus cultural and social factors, suffice it to say that I and most reasonable people would say that both play important roles that are often hard to separate  – and that it’s useful to have a word such as obesogenic that allows us to more easily describe and talk about how social factors can interact with and contribute to obesity.

By the same token, I wish we had an analogous word for how our current cultural and technological environments encourage the development of short, fragmented attention spans, and prioritize graphic and visual forms of entertainment, leisure and learning over print and book-focused ones.

Is there already a word for this? I don’t think so. When I look for one, I’m directed to all sorts of articles and books that name and frame the problem of digital distraction and the resulting fragmented and short attention spans, in different ways – but nothing that names the type of environment that creates and encourages distraction and attention-fragmentation – no equivalent of obesogenic.  

Indeed books that identify, explain and address issues of distraction and focus in our digital age have become a sub-genre unto themselves – one I’m very gradually working my way through and will post about separately (link).

But so far in all these books and popular and scholarly articles, I haven’t encountered a word that names the type of cultural and technological environment we find ourselves in when it comes to the challenges of rebuilding our attention spans and capacity to focus in an age of digital distractions.

I find the phrase “continuous partial attention” at least somewhat accurate and helpful for describing the problem, i.e., the attention state that we find ourselves in too often as a result of the constant distractions and interruptions that characterize our cultural and technological environment since the late 1990s. Linda Stone, a tech writer, consultant and executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, coined this phrase in 1998. It’s predictable that a phrase invented in 1998 doesn’t necessarily capture the full scope of what we’re dealing with more than 25 years later, but it gets at some of it – just not the environment that supports and promotes it. I’d certainly be interested in her thoughts on this – I wonder if she thinks we need a word for it.