I've thought for a long time that people create drama and get interested in it to alleviate boredom from their own lives. It's something I've seen from being on IRC for years and reading messageboards. It can actually be a group trend, with the right group of people encouraging the drama on, even if they are on opposing sides.
It can lead to both fragmentation and solidarity of smaller groups within the whole of the community, and can usually be referenced easily, by some title that only serves to illuminate how trivial the whole incident was, or at least is trivial to anyone not biased by the incident. Like my friend has an incident that lead to group splintering and a friendship breaking up called 'the mayo thing', where one person said in their private livejournal that so and so couldn't really want to lose weight if they kept eating stuff with mayo on it (or something equally stupid.)
Sometimes it's simply personality conflicts, where the intelligent thing to do would be to avoid talking to or about the person who is irritating. But quite often the opposite happens, as some people choose sides, some people try to be on both sides, some people revel in watching it happen, and some people try to avoid the whole mess. So it eventually escalates as incidents, that would normally be small on their own, pile onto the heap of indignation and fury and build up a nice big grudge match.
As far as the celebrity/famous person fixation, I think that people see their movies and read about them and like to think they know them. They like it when bad things happen to the celebs they don't like, and good things happen to the ones they do. They can sort of live vicariously through others that way, without having to put in any effort that they would have to put into their own lives. Because they can get emotionally involved to a point, but not ever be at any emotional risk themselves. They can gloat when someone who is famous and good looking and wealthy makes an error in judgement that they themselves would not have made - it's a way of feeling better than someone else, just as the media is telling you that they are better than you are. Kind of a tug-of-war game really.
I don't like the american idol thing. Yeah the mean sarah liked it when the bad singers would get railed on, but the truth of the matter is they only let these people through so that they could embarass them on television and garner viewers. A pretty jerky thing to do. I find most reality TV type stuff pretty dull anyways. I like things where they fix up people's homes or cars and you can see the fantabulous job they did, but thats not really the same thing. Like this one show I saw the other day, where they fixed up this guys 25 year old van, just redid the whole thing. I thought it was a pretty fascinating process. But then again it didn't have anything to do with a bunch of women getting in a cat fight to win a guy they think is a millionaire.
But I digress.
