Crowd symbol
A crowd symbol presupposes the feeling of belonging to the crowd .
Elias Canetti sees the typical crowd symbols in fire, sea, rain, river, forest, grain, wind, sand and heaps. For him, the mass has four typical properties: "1. The mass always wants to grow ... 2. There is equality within the mass ... 3. The mass loves density ... 4. The mass needs direction." For the German nation , he sees this in the connection between the army and the forest : "The mass symbol of the Germans was the army. But the army was more than the army: it was the marching forest." Such a mass symbol forms a core myth for Canetti .
In this sense, the Deutsche Mark also became a mass symbol. Others see the German mass symbol in the wall after the fall of the wall . The mass symbol of the French, on the other hand, is commonly seen in the revolution .
The computer , on the other hand, can be seen as a central cultural, i.e. global, mass symbol . It is also referred to as a " metaphor of postmodernism ".
Some authors want to differentiate between the mass symbol and the collective symbol .
literature
- Elias Canetti : Mass and Power , 1976.
- Jürgen Link and Wulf Wülfing (eds.): National myths and symbols in the second half of the 19th century. Structures and functions of concepts of national identity , Stuttgart 1991.