A thought in passing this morning. Here’s a screen shot that purports to be from an ad for Microsoft’s new wearable device called Band:

I say “purports” because I’ve not been able to find this particular shot and caption on any official Microsoft sites. I first encountered it in this story about Band from October of last year, and I also found it posted to a Reddit thread around the same time. You can watch the official ad here.

It may be that this image is hoax or that Microsoft decided it was a bit too disconcerting and pulled it. A more persistent sleuth should be able to determine which. Whether authentic or not, however, it is instructive.

In tweeting a link to the story in which I first saw the image, I commented: “Define ‘know,’ ‘self,’ and ‘human.'” Nick Seaver astutely replied: “that’s exactly what they’re doing, eh?”

Again, the “they” in this case appears to be a bit ambiguous. That said, the picture is instructive because it reminds us, as Seaver’s reply suggests, that more than our physical fitness is at stake in the emerging regime of quantification. If I were to expand my list of 41 questions about technology’s ethical dimensions, I would include this one: How will the use of this technology redefine my moral vocabulary? or What about myself will the use of this technology encourage me to value?

Consider all that is accepted when someone buys into the idea, even if tacitly so, that Microsoft Band will in fact deepen their knowledge of themselves. What assumptions are accepted about the nature of what it means to know and what there is to know and what can be known? What is implied about the nature of the self when we accept that a device like Band can help us understand it more effectively? We are, needless to say, rather far removed from the Delphic injunction, “Know thyself.”

It is not, of course, that I necessarily think users of Band will be so naive that they will consciously believe there is nothing more to their identity than what Band can measure. Rather, it’s that most of us do have a propensity to pay more attention to what we can measure, particularly when an element of competitiveness is introduced.

I’ll go a step further. Not only do we tend to pay more attention to what we can measure, we begin to care more about what can measure. Perhaps that is because measurement affords us a degree of ostensible control over whatever it is that we are able to measure. It makes self-improvement tangible and manageable, but it does so, in part, by a reduction of the self to those dimensions that register on whatever tool or device we happen to be using to take our measure.

I find myself frequently coming back to one line in a poem by Wendell Berry: “We live the given life, not the planned.” Indeed, and we might also say, “We live the given life, not the quantified.”

A certain vigilance is required to remember that our often marvelous tools of measurement always achieve their precision by narrowing, sometimes radically, what they take into consideration. To reveal one dimension of the whole, they must obscure the others. The danger lies in confusing the partial representation for the whole.