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editorial

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event announcing the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California, September 9, 2014. REUTERS/Stephen Lam© Stephen Lam / Reuters/Reuters

A study in 2008 concluded that the number of American university students displaying narcissistic personality tendencies had increased 30 per cent since 1985. Since then, "selfie" has been named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary, and the Queen has bemoaned the fact that, when she decamps the palace to meet people face-to-face, she is inevitably greeted by their backs. Or more precisely the backs of their skulls and the sight of their smartphone screens raised overhead, pointing back in her direction: the selfie arabesque.

Nobody takes pictures of the Eiffel Tower or the Queen or the Grand Canyon any more; they take pictures of themselves in front of interchangeable backdrops. So what, then, will the rise of the smartwatch mean? What will it tell us when people go from featuring themselves in every photo to obsessively monitoring their heart rates 24/7?

Next year, Apple, which has a gift for taking emerging technologies – the personal computer, the MP3 player, the smartphone – and creating vast new markets for them, will release a new device that mimics a wristwatch in appearance but is in fact a bundle of sensors that automatically records users' existences on a micro level. (It also tells time.)

Soon enough, perfectly healthy people will declare via the hardware on their wrists that they are so preoccupied with the minutiae of their being that they are keeping a computerized record of every heartbeat and the number of times they stand up each hour. Boon to public health? Or normalization of extreme self-regard?

The world changes, technology changes, values change. There is no logic in decrying the march of progress, but the same cannot be said for the inexorable rise of self-regard. We have the power to see and feel and live in the world around us; we don't need to mediate and validate it through pixelated ephemera stored in the cloud. There is something sad about using devices to take the measure of our own hearts. We should beware of how far we go.

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