Opinion

You awaken in your basic room, the sound of cockerels, voices you don't understand and the dust stirring outside your open window as the light and the heat from the sun already surpasses any summer day back home. You slip on your khakis/harem pants, pull your patterned head scarf onto your ruggedly tousled hair and most importantly your array of ethnic-y beaded bracelets. You head off in your pack, laughing, chatting of the day to come and generally looking very cool and adventurous. The smiles you are met with every day seem to allude to the fact that what you're doing feels pretty worthwhile, an amazing experience, great on the CV… Sound familiar? To countless students and young people, this will surely stir memories from that unforgettable volunteering trip they did in -insert name of ...

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...