A brief check on Google Trends shows that the last week has brought a thirty-fold increase in searches on “Tiger Woods.” Just as a comparison: when Woods won the U.S. open, the spike was nowhere close to that volume. Google News feeds something about Tiger Woods every few minutes now.
It is dismaying to watch the spectacle: Terabytes of gore fill cyberspace with truly important speculations like “how many mistresses does Tiger have?” The Google stats show that while humans have an endless need to idolize, the pleasure of enviously destroying the demigods of celebrity is even greater. The infotainment system wouldn’t keep producing “news,” gossip and speculation about the private lives of celebrities, if there wasn’t an insatiable hunger for it. What, then, is behind the human obsession with celebrity, and the pleasure to see them fall? The burgeoning discipline of Experimental Existential Psychology can explain some of it.
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