Opinion

An acknowledgement: The Orbital would like to acknowledge that Isaac Masih strenuously denies creating the Islamophobic and homophobic tweets in question and, upon believing his Twitter account was hacked, has since disabled it. IN DEFENCE by Antonia King Before I begin, let it be made clear that no one is in defence of the prejudiced views which were allegedly expressed by Postman Isaac, myself included. They are clearly in no way representative of the student body. However, the campaign for him to be banned from the SU or otherwise reprimanded I do not agree with. As many have said on the matter, his supposed views have not been expressed to students at Royal Holloway in person. No students, to my knowledge, have felt personally victimized by Isaac. If this was the case, then of course ...

In 1917, Eliot wrote of a time “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”. Despite Eliot writing just under one hundred years ago, he neatly encapsulates the essence of social media, and the cultural compulsion to convey a specific type of person: a surface, a “face”. Social networking insistently requires us to create this surface – to select our profile pictures, ask us what we're thinking/ how we're feeling, whether we're interested in men or women, where we live. Though we're entitled (and quite rightly) to withhold this information from public display, the fact that we're asked creates an increased self-awareness and the means to categorise ourselves. Social networking engenders an opportunity to technologically emulate society's obsession with “faces”. I finally created a T...

The University of London has announced that its Student Union will close this year. This decision was not put to a student vote; no student was even on the review panel which confirmed the closure. This represents an undemocratic attack on student unionism by University management. Of course it's important that Universities have their own individual unions, but as part of the collective of London Universities, we need a student-lead institution that encompasses all of the involved universities. The University of London Union (ULU) is important in student fights to maintain rent prices around London, and involved in the maintenance of Senate House Library, as well as other London University services. ULU also allows input from all London Universities, not just the most renowned ones. Being...