Celebrity self-reports can serve as evidence of cultural-structural shifts.

Evidence

Because their status and livelihood depend on it, mega-celebrities like Jolie are necessarily sensitive seismographs registering the subterranean movements of culture. They are thus interesting sources of evidence for hypotheses linking cultural phenomena with social and personality structures. So it is noteworthy that Rosa’s theory of acceleration provides a plausible explanation for another otherwise paradoxical phenomenon that appears in Jolie’s statement: the fact that she claims she “didn’t really fit” and at the same time that she was “cool” (for modern culture perhaps the prototypical way of “fitting in”). — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 32

Categorization

• QUESTION: The method — treating celebrities as ‘seismographs’ of culture — is a quirk of the introduction’s argument worth interrogating as an evidential move.
• XREF: connects to: Postmodern affirmation of fragmentation depends on abandoning autonomy ideals — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 785