© Alamy
Apologies if that feels like a bit of a heavy introduction for a piece on the decline of Facebook amongst my peers but - like Auden's love - I had always assumed the network would be constant presence in my life. A couple of times at university I wondered what would happen if people stopped using the site, or if it disappeared. I would have no physical photos of my college friends, like those of my parents' that we sometimes unearthed at home; I would be stripped of the wall-to-wall messages we had built up over the years and left with only a handful of letters and cards.
Sometimes I thought about printing out pictures or saving some of the more memorable messages to computer, but I never did. Just like three-month summer holidays and the ability to function after four hours' sleep, I reasoned that Facebook would always be there.
But two years after graduation, to continue in the mournful vein in which I began, the site is crumbling before my eyes. There's nothing new about predicting the demise of world's most popular social networking site: articles in 2010 told us that "everyone was quitting Facebook", 2013 was the year of "virtual identity suicide" and figures released earlier this year suggested some 600,000 people in the UK had "disappeared" from the site last December (a claim the California-based company denies).
On the other hand, Facebook has more users and is more profitable than ever before. As it celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this year, the site which was famously launched by Mark Zuckerberg from his Harvard dorm room boasted 1.23 billion monthly active users and 757 million daily users. Despite a shaky initial public offering, the network is now worth $135bn, generating a profit of $1.5bn in 2013.
The problem with these death of Facebook/triumph of Facebook headlines is that they refer to the site or the company as a whole, whereas anyone who uses it knows that it's only as good as the content your friends are posting and that you are interacting with. If my notifications are all from friends and family sharing stories they know I'll like or laugh at, it's a good site; if my news feed is full of people I met on my gap yah throwing buckets of ice over their head, it's rubbish.
It doesn't matter that technology websites are telling us that "everyone who's anyone" is deleting their profiles - whether out of concerns about privacy or after learning that Facebook is trying to manipulate users' moods. It's when the people we're interested in start leaving that it's over for us.
And, for me, they are. Last month a close friend from university, now working in the arts and one of the heavier Facebook users I know, decided to go cold turkey. For a couple of years she had mainly been posting to promote projects she was working on, and decided this was coming across as bragging and unpleasant. Inspired by her example, another friend permanently logged out, explaining the decision thus: "It makes me depressed to look through other people's pictures even though I know they curate their profiles. But mainly I don't like living my life in a way that's hyper-aware of how it looks to other people who - actually - I don't care about. So I'd rather cut it out."
So two fewer reasons to log on, and six years worth of photos and public messages between the three of us taken off the site. Others I know are using it less and less, either because they're worried about what their employers might see, or just because they don't feel the need to update 500 people they studied with on where they've been on holiday.
Whereas a couple of years ago I would have been surprised to find that someone my age didn't have a profile (a fact generally announced in the same smug tone as someone revealing they never watch TV), now it's hardly worthy of comment. And so I care about Facebook less, and check notifications less often.
It's lemming-like, I know, to have followed my friends into the social network and then follow them out in this way. But the thing about social networks is that they only work when everyone's there and everyone's active. It was Facebook that gave us FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. Despite the record-breaking number of users and profits, it increasingly feels like the party is happening elsewhere.
And I'm not the only one. That refers to the ending of Orwell's dystopian, prescient novel 1984, by the way. Just as Mussolini remarked, fascism is more properly called 'corporatism', because it's the merging of state and corporate power. That's what Facebook, Twitter, Skype, even Google and others actually represent. They are all parts of the corporate, fascist state.