Facebook offers to write your own personal "Look Homeward, Angel."

Well, it looks like Facebook is making another decisive move in the direction of being a site that "help[s] tell the story of your life," in Mark Zuckerberg's words, and then analyzes "the story of your life" with reference to the stories of your friends' lives and offers you stuff you might like to buy. I wrote about earlier movements in this direction back at the League over a year ago.

The problem with a service that offers a comprehensive "story of my life" is that it gives me two options:

1. I have to manage that story carefully and make all sorts of constant little decisions about what I'm telling people.
2. I let Facebook manage most of that stuff for me, algorithmically.

Option 2 is out of the question. Option 1 isn't natural for me, since I'm used to a public-private distinction that Facebook wants to discard, and it looks like it's going to take up more and more time to adjust to changes. For a while now, Facebook has been a service I wouldn't sign up for if it were pitched to me fresh.

Of course, I'm not mad about anything, and I don't think I'll particularly miss "the old Facebook." But this stuff is going to come up again and again for the rest of our lives, and it's worth thinking about our choices in this new networked world.

Practically, I think I'm going to deactivate my account. There's no great reason to delete it permanently; I might rather be able to get back into the system to adjust settings the next time the site makes a huge perverse data-sharing move.