I found the story of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi quite captivating. The politics that shaped the author’s childhood really made me think about what I thought I knew about history and global conflict. It may arguably be a limited view of Iran’s history since it was written from one person’s perspective, but it still made me think about the limited perspective I have. Of course, this also brought up the views of educational scholar, Farhat Shahzad, on interpretive communities that our class discussed in ASTU 100. My interpretive community, in other words, my family, the community I grew up in, and my religious background, has influenced the way that I perceived Persepolis. For example, when I first read Satrapi’s story, I was taken aback by the way she discussed communism in her country with respect and admiration. One of Marjane’s hero’s is her uncle, who would be seen as a communist by the leaders at the time in Iran. This threw me off a little bit because I always had the idea that the communist ideology was wrong and evil. I suppose this comes from my mother’s beliefs against the communist parties, and I never really thought to question it, or even consider that countries like Cuba function just fine under a communist party. I always just connected communism to extremists like North Korea’s Kim Jeong Il, Cambodia’s Pol Pot or China’s Mao Zedong. After reading Persepolis, I realized how unfair this was, and how little I knew about each countries political history and how a policy could work in one country and not another. I realized that this was the same as connecting religion with religious fundamentalists, it was like thinking that the Islamic revolution in Iran was a reflection of Muslims everywhere. Satrapi’s Persepolis made me more conscious about my political views and which interactive communities formed them.

How much of what I know is influenced by my parents, high school teachers, and my community, and how much of what I think are my own opinions? When it comes to everything from politics to religion to what books I read, where do my opinions come from and how are they formed? According to Farhat Shahzad, we learn and remember from our interpretive communities, but I guess up until now I thought I had more sway in my own likes and dislikes. Reading the scholar’s essay however, I came to realize that maybe I don’t give enough credit where credit is due. One example that made a lot of sense to me was in a recent Politics 100 lecture by Dr. Erikson. Listening to the views of Karl Marx’s influence given by Dr. Erikson is very different to what I learned from my parents. In retrospect I didn’t think I had views about Marx, but learning more about him from Politics class made me realize that I had a preconceived attitude against him. In a more every day sense, I think of social media, commercial advertisements and popular culture. I used to argue that Facebook and what trends my friends are buying into don’t have that much of an influence on me, but there seems to be some pretty hard evidence saying otherwise. Shahzad found in his study interviewing a wide demographic of high school students, that communities with more of an emotional attachment play a higher role in the processes of remembering a learning. Thinking about it this way, how much time do we casually spend of Facebook? At least for me, I would classify this as an emotional attachment. I think that this point could be used in arguing that social media is a very powerful tool in how student’s today remember and learn.

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