Oxford's Proctors have resorted to Facebook in their latest campaign against post-exam celebrations.  
Senior members of Univeristy staff are using the social networking tool to track down photographs of students participating in trashing, using them as evidence upon which to base disciplinary action.
OUSU President Martin McCluskey has leapt to students' defence, sending out emails advising them to alter privacy settings on Facebook "to prohibit members of staff and faculty from viewing your profile and photographs.”
The student union stressed that while it does not condone antisocial behaviour it is determined to stand for the privacy of its members and that "disciplinary procedures at all levels within the University should be fair and transparent."
It has drawn up a document offering advice to students who have been summoned by the Proctors, explaining disciplinary procedures and possible outcomes.  

Oxford student Will Jaggs has pleaded guilty to killing a 25 year-old woman in a frenzied sexually-motivated attack.

Police were called to the crime scene after being alerted by neighbours and they arrived to find Jaggs naked and screaming before he began stabbing himself in the chest. Miss Braham lay naked in front of him in a pool of blood.
Last week the Oxford student pleaded not guilty to murder but yesterday  admitted manslaughter on the grounds of dimished responsibility.

He has been sent to Broadmoor Hosptial, a high-security psychiatric unit in Berkshire, where he will remain indefinitely.

My mother says the scariest thing about Facebook is that there are no rules. How can I distinguish love interests from professional contacts when everyone is just a ‘friend,’ she worries.   

How wrong she is.  

Last week, five friends and I discussed Facebook etiquette. Without much effort, we agreed on several key patterns in our online behavior, an unwritten rulebook:  

Friendly hellos and plans to meet for coffee merit a wall post, which can be seen by anyone. Date invites or secret gossip go by Facebook message (like a private email, but sent over Facebook’s server). Aimless chatter occurs over AOL Instant Messenger. For job interviews or chats with Mom, there is Skype’s online phone service. Email is for sending resumes and contacting professors.  

The hierarchy is strict. Mixing up the categories—asking someone out on their wall, for example, or Skype-ing just to make lunch plans—is social suicide.  

My younger sister, a high-school sophomore, has an equally strong online code. Ever since my mother got a Facebook profile, my sister has busily mocked her blundering misuse of the site. ‘You can’t call me by baby names on my wall, ALL my friends will see that!’  

But my sister’s Facebook etiquette is not the same as mine. For my sister, regulation is about hiding more formal contact (with family, adults and teachers) from her casual friends, so they don’t see her as un-cool. For my friends and I, regulation is about concealing casual content, relationships and college life from potential employers or professors. Some of my friends, for example, have taken to editing their Facebook pages during internship-application-season in case employers are online.  

Every media revolution—from the first papers to radio and telegraph to TV—has seen old rulebooks thrown out. Skeptics, like my mother, inevitably panic, but eventually, new rules develop. Wikipedia has already established its own system of authority, freezing pages when content becomes unreliable or hostile.  

With Facebook now open to everyone, the rules will continue to change. The question is how. As they join social networks, will an older generation of CEO’s and parents adopt social manners from the young?  Or, as the first group of users grows up, will Facebook itself grow more formal?

Earlier this week saw former OUSU President Alan Strickland vying to take over Tony Blair’s position as MP for Sedgefield. 

After more than 50 applications were received for the position, Strickland became one of the 11 longlisted candidates who faced interviews with the National Executive Committee in London. 

Having impressed the panel at this stage he made it into the shortlist, which included former ministers and councillors, but lost out to seasoned politician Phil Wilson, who won by a comfortable majority.  

The primary reasons for Strickland’s loss were put down to age and inexperience. Had he succeeded, the role would have seen him fighting in the by-election later this month.

We've been getting a lot of questions about site archiving. Please rest assured we have not forgotten you or your previous work! We'll be working on it throughout the month and will have everything up and accessible as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you've written for Cherwell in the past, or plan to do so in the future, please be sure to register with the site so that we can give you authorial credit for your work. All the best to everyone – enjoy your holiday!
Leah

There's a weird paradox in the way Gen Y lives and works. Everywhere I am reading about how the Millennials are super-driven, hyper-informed, search engine wizards. We chug lattes. We get to work early. We leave late. We want to be promoted. We expect to make millions by age 30. If all of this is new to you, read Lindsey Gerdes's work on young professionals at BusinessWeek.
 
A friend told me she was at her book club meeting in New York when a young writer started crying. She's turning 30 and she hasn't sold a book yet. Her career is over, she believes.
 
Some would say this makes perfect sense. We've got the technology to do everything faster, and get more information, more mileage, for every minute of each day. Why shouldn't we want to maximize that potential and feel inadequate when it takes too long?
 
But isn't it also true that everyone lives longer now? A 30-year old today is less than a third through her life–she's more like a 22 year old in the last generation's reckoning. That calculation has had a slowing effect on most other life choices–people get married and have kids later now because they know they've got more than enough time for family.
 
Why is our professional life speeding up when life's getting longer? Why am I sprinting for a finish line that's further and further away?
 Cherwell 24 is not responsible for content of external links

In Sarajevo, as the wife of a BBC war correspondent, Rosie Whitehouse and her five children “heard the firing of the shots that started a war”. Heather Ryan asks what else she had to juggle in the raising of a most unusual family.  

“Family travel with bullets” is not a synopsis that could be applied to many books. But “Are We There Yet” is no ordinary travel memoir. Author Rosie Whitehouse and her war reporter husband, Tim Judah, brought up their children in Bucharest, Belgrade, Croatia and Bosnia during their most unstable years rather than separate their family. Her book not only describes the struggles of a wife and mother trying to create a stable home environment in the midst of war and social upheaval, but also examines the (positive) effect that a childhood spent following Daddy across Europe has had on her children’s identity and development. 

Whitehouse is a journalist herself; indeed, she and Judah met while working on the student newspaper at the London School of Economics. She was News Editor, and he was Arts Editor; he caught her eye when he delivered his article to her office, and she managed to get him to ask her out by setting up an arts magazine, inviting him to contribute, and hoping he would take her on dates with the free tickets to cultural events that he received. Needless to say, it worked. Studying International History at undergraduate level, and then Russian government and politics at Master’s, Whitehouse’s university career was good preparation for her career in the BBC World Service. 

It was as an ambitious editor of Newshour that Whitehouse “woke up one morning and felt sick”; she had fallen pregnant with her eldest son, Ben. In 1980s Britain, she tells me, “women were expected to look as poised and elegant as Princess Di, and hold down a full-time job as well – to have it all”. In spreading themselves so thinly, Whitehouse counters, women “ended up with nothing”. Finding it increasingly hard to go out to work and leave her son with a babysitter, she decided to become a full-time mum, a move which precipitated her husband – a freelance reporter – to approach the Times and ask for work. He was dispatched to cover Bucharest, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall – revolution had swept over Romania and thousands of people were dying in street-fights. Despite the daunting political situation, Whitehouse was “delighted” with her husband’s assignation and there was no question that she and Ben would be accompanying him.  

Did Rosie ever wonder whether she was doing the right thing? Of course, but although she concedes “perhaps I’m slightly crazy”, Whitehouse insists that her family’s experiences have enabled her children to “meet history head-on”. She is confident that their unusual upbringing has given her children an appreciation of history, politics and culture that conventional education can’t provide, and this is perhaps borne out by the fact that her firstborn Ben is now studying Modern History and Politics here at Oxford. Whitehouse had a somewhat unconventional childhood herself. Her father was a doctor – a “workaholic” who took his daughter along on his ward rounds on Christmas Day – and his work took him to Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein, and Poland in the grip of Communism. Family holidays consisted of accompanying her father on business trips abroad. However, she is adamant that her identity, as a child who travelled often but from a settled base in Britain, differs fundamentally from that of her children, two of whom had never lived in the UK before the family recently re-settled here. She uses the Troubles as an illustration. With an Irish Catholic mother, Whitehouse says that she “grew up with an Irish identity that fed my interest in politics”. In contrast, when she visited Ireland with her children, they “identified with the ethnic strife on the streets of Belfast” but do not self-define as Irish, taking instead “a worldwide approach”. 

I am interested in the conflict between motherhood and career to which Whitehouse alludes in her discussion of the book. “When you have a child,” she tells me, “you mutate – your child becomes the focus of your life. You’re torn in two.” As a foreign correspondent, finding a satisfactory work-life balance was particularly difficult. But when she was a full-time mum bringing up her children in the Balkans, she gained a new perspective on the things that people work in order to buy: “We don’t need half the rubbish people buy in the UK. Do you really need designer baby clothes?” However, she’s not advocating that women should forego career in favour of motherhood, and feels that the workplace battles her generation fought have prepared the ground for our generation to have a better work-life balance. 

Whitehouse is a vocal critic of newsrooms, which she says “neglect” the families of the foreign correspondents they dispatch to dangerous situations. In 17 years of her husband’s career, only once has somebody from a newspaper – the Times – contacted her to check everything was all right. How could this be remedied? Firstly, she says, a journalist calling with news of her husband should “think before they open their mouth” – because ringing late at night, and leaving terse messages such as “Your husband isn’t dead”, are common occurrences that raise more concerns than they alleviate. She illustrates her assertion that journalists are often thoughtless by describing a recent visit to Warminster in Wiltshire, site of an army barracks. “Reporters were asking the Army wives how they’d feel if their husbands were killed!” Secondly, she suggests an Internet forum could be established for war reporters and their families. “Men need an outlet where they can talk about trauma,” Whitehouse says, “and there could be a closed forum where people could ask advice, and post bits of information and messages of support.” 

Whitehouse hopes that, in the absence of such a forum, her book can offer some support to families in a similar position to her own. “No parenting guide I’ve ever seen tells you how to explain to your five-year-old why war has broken out, or what to say when your child asks if Daddy loves Iraqis more than he loves them.” In more ways than one, “Are We There Yet” is a first.
Rosie Whitehouse will be speaking at QI on Tuesday, June 26^th, at 7:30. Tickets will be £3 on the door. “Are We There Yet” can be bought from www.reportagepress.com – it costs £8.99 and part of the proceeds go to the Rory Peck Trust, which helps the families of freelance newsgatherers who are killed, seriously wounded or imprisoned. 

Rosie Whitehouse has a blog, which contains excerpts from her book: www.travelswithmyfrontlinefamily.blogspot.com
By Heather Ryan
Cherwell 24 is not responsible for content of external links

Once upon a time, Facebook was for Ivy Leaguers, iPods were for tech geeks, and CNN was for the politicos.
Nowadays, Oxford tutors are on Facebook and grandmothers carry iPods. Politicians are getting on YouTube! to reach the young reluctant voters they need to secure if they want to survive into the next decade.
Tony Blair thinks new media is a feral beast, but he’s smart enough to use it himself. When Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of France a month ago, Blair gave out he usual “welcome to the club” message statesmen send one another, but he did it over viral video. After chuckling at his school boy French, I have to give Blair credit. Like it or not, he knows there is no going back to the old-media days.
Back on my side of the pond, Hillary Clinton is doing her part to run a new-media campaign. This month, she asked voters to help pick her campaign song in a series of kitschy viral video spots, the last of which offered a decent parody of the last Soprano episode.
Do young Americans have really poor taste, because they picked Celine Dion’s “You and I”? More likely is that Hillary’s video campaign never reached the hip young things she was after. As Jessi Hempel of Businessweek explains on her blog, Hillary’s schtick comes across as decidedly old school, meant for TV networks. Internet video is its own beast, and the style needs to feel authentic. To come across as young and cool, you have to be young and cool.
For Barack Obama, a political novice, this is good news. And the Obama campaign has the chance to reap big benefits from YouTube video, namely the I’ve Got a Crush on Obama video recently launched by the comedy site BarelyPolitical.com. A sultry young woman in short shorts and a shorter t-shirt grinds up against posters of Barack and croons, “I can’t wait for 2008/Baby you’re the best candidate.”
A smart candidate would capitalize now to tap the population of young voters that no one’s been able to bring to the polls, despite all the chatter about youth activism each election year. A smart Obama would buy the rights to that video and post links to it on official campaign sites. A smart Obama would offer the 5 teens at BarelyPolitical a day shadowing him on Capital Hill, where they could video tape him at work, and YouTube! the footage.

A stodgy candidate would take offense at a video that highlights just how young and inexperienced Obama is. The video signals that Obama is young enough to attract a woman young enough to be the daughter or niece of most middle-aged voters.

I’m an Obama-skeptic, and so far, I can’t tell which camp he’s fallen into. And importantly, it’s not Obama’s own charisma that makes the video so powerful—it’s the fact that teens, not campaign staff, came up with it, that it rose to fame as part of the ideas MoshPit online, and was never planted into prominence by Obama2008.

Even Obama can’t force his way into social media—his application on Facebook has gotten eye rolls from most of my friends as “trying too hard.” David Cameron, who has one of the better political blogs, can’t force it either—Cameron’s site has few comments, and as far as I can tell, most Britons aren’t reading it.

That’s the problem for politicians in the new media age—success is about knowing how to ride the waves created by viewers and voters, not about making your own waves. What do you think—which political leaders “get” the Internet, and how much difference does it make to you if they do?
Cherwell 24 is not responsible for content of external links

Hi all,
I’m taking a break from end-of-year packing to introduce myself, and this blog, to you. Mine is a big packing job, since I’m heading back to the US of A after 9 months as a Visiting Student in this watery isle and spire-y university. The year’s been incredible, and I leave with rich impressions of England and the English, most of which I’ve published in my opinions column at the Brown Daily Herald. If you’re interested, check out my musings.
I’ve been writing for the Herald since 2004, on politics, culture and how our generation (Y, if you were born between 1980 and 2000), experiences the world. Oftentimes, defining Gen Y culture has a lot to do with the technology and trends (iPods, e-books, wikipedia, facebook and blogs like this one) for which we 20-somethings are the guinea-pigs.
If there’s one place that the Internet has made its biggest impact, it’s in schools and universities—can you imagine writing an essay without Google or JStor? I can’t. And if you believe social theorists like David Brooks, who say that the biggest culture wars occur over education, that people are defined by educational experience, then changes in our world, in the lives of 20-something students, are the harbingers of changes in the world at large.
The second front in the Internet culture war is the world of journalism. As a Herald columnist, a blogger here and elsewhere and a news reporter for Cherwell and Cherwell24, I’ve watched news media slowly adjust to the Internet Age. Mainstream print papers are diving into the blogosphere; blogs are turning into big business. As the place we turn for the truth about our world, changing news media means big changes in our social worldview. Once again, as the first group to grow up with GoogleNews, LexisNexis, RSS feeds and CNN Pipeline, we, generation Y, are the test case.
Here at Instant Cappuccino, I’ll post news stories and videos about our changing world. I’ll post my thoughts on technology, politics and popular culture. As a forum for students, Cappuccino will focus on issues in education and the spread of information. As a blog, Cappuccino will be part of the transformation.

Of course, what makes our culture of Wikipedia and YouTube different from the first Internet revolution of Yahoo and Netscape, is that interaction is overtaking information as the premium capital.
So please, post your own thoughts. Tell me when (and this happens often) I am wrong about what’s trendy. Link to Cappuccino on your own blogs, and tell me what other sites I should be following. With your participation, over a cup of virtual coffee, we can make sense of the new world we live in, and predictions for the world to come.
Cherwell 24 is not responsible for content of external links

Genet’s The Balcony is a very strange play. First performed in London in 1957, its opening night was laced with drama as Genet accused the director of ruining his play. Indeed, it’s a very easy to play to ruin: constructed in a series of overlong vignettes that drag pace and slow momentum, it’s a challenging task for any director.

The Balcony focuses on Madame Irma, the proprietress of a ‘house of illusions’. Clients from all walks of life come to The Grand Balcony to fulfil their fantasies. She provides the machinery for their odd, sometimes diabolic re-enactments: a Bishop chastises a beautiful young penitent, a Judge condemns a thief, a General rides his ‘young filly’ in battle. Meanwhile, a revolution is raging outside (a fact repeatedly brought to our attention by background gunfire: a nice touch, but unsubtle as it continued a few hours into the play). As insurgents foment rebellion, real figures of authority are deposed or killed, and their fake counterparts must take their places.

Meg Jayanth does a credible job of bringing this difficult piece to the stage, and must certainly be applauded for excellent stylistic vision. The set and costumes were both impeccable, and the opening of the second act was unconventional but highly effective. The play dragged considerably, however, and during many of the scenes I felt a lack of tension (sexual or otherwise). During the initial fantasies, the characters appeared more bored than aroused; I expected to squirm in my seat, but instead found myself wondering when the tableaus would end. The play, particularly in the first act, should cause a frisson of discomfort and voyeuristic guilt/pleasure. Unfortunately, the prevailing atmosphere was stale rather than electric.

Melissa Julian-Jones’ performance as Madame Irma grew on me. Much of the first act she flounced about, swishing her robe and performing the same distracting, fluttering gestures (a hand on the breast, a hand touching her hair). But she surprised and impressed with her depth in scenes with Carmen and in conveying her hopeless, masochistic love for The Chief of Police. Her chemistry with Laurie Penny’s Carmen made their scenes some of the most crackling of the night. This was partially due to Penny’s winning and natural performance. Morgan’s Chief of Police was terse and sinister, his megalomania more pronounced as the night wore on. The Bishop (David Coghill), Judge (Jonathan Totman), and General (Alex Stewart) all turned in convincing performances, but could have been more hyperbolic in their ‘roles’, the better to show anxiety when actually thrust into them.

Despite some glitches, this is certainly a production unlike most Oxford offerings. The Grand Balcony is worth a visit.

Lakshmi Krishnan

The Balcony runs all week at the OFS at 7:30 pm.