Crime Scene: Memory Lane

I recently took a stroll down the online memory lane that is the Felix archive, all the way back to the heady days of 1998. Times have changed.

Back then it was acceptable to write in to Felix to announce that the Union President was “utterly, utterly, utterly fucked” at the Summer Ball. It was also fine and dandy for ‘Colonel Wicky, Sergeant M’Arse and Petty Officer Jism’ to recount their attempt to break into the Queen’s Tower at 3am one morning.

Even the news stories were bizarre: Like the time when rowing club’s minibus ended up in the Thames; a pitched fistfight-battle after an Arabian society function over the possession of a mobile phone; the football club ripping the plumbing out of a pub in Hammersmith (getting all Imperial Students barred in the process); and the time in the old Southside bar when the Rugby Captain punched another player in the face so hard that he needed five stitches.

These are just a few examples taken at random from a small selection of issues from the 1997-8 academic year. The pages of Felix were chock full of Union Bar nose-breakings, punch-ups, and all manner of laddish behavior, but no one seemed to care all that much.

Fast forward sixteen years and we see the anti-social behaviour of Imperial students splashed across not only these hallowed pages, but also the Evening Standard, The Independent, TheTelegraph, and the Huffington Post. Incidents that were commonplace in days gone past are now occasional scandals that threaten the reputation of our University and our Students’ Union.

Any reasonable person can see that these incidents, past and present, are not acceptable. Today, firm sanctions are applied to those who engage in these often-criminal actions, as is right and proper. But why didn’t the same happen to our predecessors?

There are a number of possible explanations, but one of the most appealing is the inexorable rise of social media and 24-hour online news coverage. Before Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat came along it was easy for uncomfortable and embarrassing events to stay out of the harsh glare that is the media spotlight. These stories spread by word of mouth and through the printed page of Felix, which would likely have kept them broadly within the student community. Without any external pressure, the path of least resistance is to forget about these events, and not to take action against the perpetrators.

Nowadays, many of the people and Clubs who do stupid things like this will even broadcast their activities on social media, sending snaps, tweets and statuses of things that they really shouldn’t want anyone else to see. Even the passers-by who would in the past have just muttered to themselves and walked away now tweets and shares their experiences, making it impossible to keep these embarrassing and often troubling incidents within the Imperial bubble.

Is this a good thing? Well, yes. Even though it is deeply embarrassing for us all to have the good name of our beloved University dragged through the mud, the accountability of the 21st century means that normal, responsible students are more likely to be able to enjoy a night out at a Union bar or a sports club social without getting into a fight, being pressured into nude drinking games, or in any other way being affected by a toxic culture of antisocial, violent and intimidating behavior.

It’s a bitter pill for us to swallow, but at the end of the day it is medicine.