ABSTRACT
Popular culture is people’s culture. Common culture and people were for thousands of years illiterate. The Helots in ancient Greece—nonpeople—had no rights or political voice. Crowds were and are composed of people with different needs, impulses, and goals. Just when Europe’s traditional oral-rural culture was being engulfed by the Industrial Revolution, scholars and intellectuals “discovered” the people and the folk. To prove his theory, Gottfried von Herder began to collect and publish Volkslieder-songs of the people—and Volksmarchen—folk tales. For most people caught up in the high-tech world, the very idea of escape smacked of treason. People long called common, primitive, or mass seem to be far more complex and sensitive than most intellectuals have wanted to admit. Thucydides and his Roman counterpart, Tacitus, assumed it was the nature of common people to be irresponsible and uninformed. Crowds were and are composed of people with different needs, impulses, and goals.
