Popular imagination? 大众想象

Reader question: Please explain “popular imagination”, as in this sentence: The black hole has entered the popular imagination as an object too massive that neither light nor matter can escape its gravitational pull. The bold change was originally suggested by Sarah Shapiro, a Foggy Bottom resident and local activist, who wanted residents to “confront the rest of the nation with the injustice of our lack of voting rights.” Visitors and tourists, perhaps ignorant of Washington’s unique political circumstance, would be forced to wonder at the motto’s background. “This will make people scratch their heads,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting House Representative, told the Washington Post. The Declaration of Independence, one of the country’s founding documents, condemns King George III “for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” In the popular imagination, the phrase defined the conflict that lead to the creation of our own, more just government. The goal is to empower people to take action and, according to Cristina Uribe, chief campaigns officer for The Center for Cultural Power, to “shift our worldviews.” “So much of what people are seeing actually reinforces this narrative that … this problem is so big, I can’t do anything,” says Uribe.