In his last blog for our ASTU class, Michael wrote about Farhat Shahzad’s article on “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” and how unsettling it was for him to realize that our own personal memories are influenced by different sources of society. I have to agree with Michael on this one, our personal memories are supposed to be our own recollections of what we see going on in the world, not what everyone tells us is going on. We want to believe that our memories are recollections that we capture by ourselves and that will remain intact throughout the years, but that is not the case. Michael argues “for me personal memory, is exactly that, it is personal. Memory is seen with your own eyes and seeing something with your own eyes is far more convincing that reliving it through someone else”. The idea that family, friends, politicians, and even the media act as our interpretative communities, according to Shahzad, makes us believe that every memory we have is the product of someone else’s perspective, and that is really scary. At the end of the day however, we are the ones who choose what to remember and how to remember it, whether it is the War on Terror or a trip to Europe, we put the pieces together and guard those memories within the context of society in our own minds.