Magnificent obsessions

November 16, 2006
LiveWire

YOUR friends don't understand you, your workmates think you're a weirdo and you've taken to hiding away to spend solitary moments with your Precious. Thanks to the internet, pursuing your obsession now needn't be a solitary pleasure.

Whether it's Elvis sightings, spotting aliens or just plain trainspotting that gets your juices flowing, the internet is tailor-made for connecting you with those precious few who can truly understand your passion. The internet has shrunk the planet so much that your fellow obsessives are easily googled.

Obsession has always been with us in various forms, from the harmless to the seriously weird, from the ditzy to the dark and downright dangerous. The melting pot of cyberspace makes no judgements. A particular keyword combination can prompt search engines to deliver sites about gaming legend Dungeons and Dragons next to sites about sadism, canaries next to cannibalism, pirates next to pornography.

Some obsessions are mainstream: our obsession with all things celebrity doesn't just flood through the TV, radio and the newsstands, it also generates obscene amounts of net traffic.

According to the 2007 Guinness Book of Records, the most googled celebrities this year were Brad Pitt and Janet Jackson, with Paris Hilton and the Baywatch man himself, David Hasselhoff, not far behind.

Celebrity stalking reaches disturbing heights on the Manhattan-based gawker.com gossip site, which allows users to report real-time celebrity sightings, upload mobile phone pictures and even label the location where the celebrity was spotted on to a map displayed on the site's "Stalker" section.

Unhealthy? Probably, says US writer Norman Solomon, who says that the flip-side of celebrity obsession is contempt for "average" people.

"The slippery slope of fame fixation puts our sense of human proportion on the skids," he says. "The danger is that when celebrities matter more, the rest of us matter less."

Other obsessions are far less new-fangled. Advocates of the planet Nibiru claim that interest in their particular object of affection dates back thousands of years. Depending on which theory you choose to make your own, Nibiru is either the ancient Babylonian name for Jupiter or an as-yet undiscovered planet orbiting our solar system backwards, or the home of Jelaila Starr, an alien trapped in the body of a woman in Kansas, who has become a galactic messenger.

If you are willing to fork out an estimated $US2300 ($A3000) for her Starseed training, Jelaila Starr can make you a galactic messenger too.