I'd say that sports and performances have always been for audiences - two kids start scrapping and a chorus of little voices forms around them, going 'fight fight fight' (source: I live close to a primary school).

And then you have a long period of penny dreadfuls and public hangings and murder ballads and soap operas, all designed to appeal to the base instincts of the audience, and people discussing the lives of Bobby and Sue Ellen. the major shift in my lifetime is that we more and more treat not only celebrities, but ordinary people (who blog, have Youtube channels) as protagonists in a soap opera. The less interactive social media become, the more people use them to talk down from a platform at the masses, the more they become 'celebrities' in their own right and their movements are dissected by an every-hungry audience.

And then I remember how in Jane Austen's time, everyone was sitting around the fire while one person read out the letters about What Our Edith Did Last Month In Brighton and I wonder whether this hasn't always been a part of humanity, only for a short time we focused mostly on fictional characters and we're coming full circle again.