No, I think it's more difficult for these things to capture the world, as opposed to a noisy subset of it. Just like basically no tv show will ever have the sort of global audience of The Tonight Show in the Carson era, or MASH, but can still be a significant hit in terms of audience, etc. There are many successful celebrities, or books or movies or what have you, that reach just fine without having anywhere near the overall reach that their progenitors did.

Not that this was ever universal. One need only consider that, for example, ten percent of the US audience had a rather different view of the world than did the ninety percent majority. Jack Johnson just getting his pardon after all these years illustrates the flip side of this (Muhammad Ali shows that this particular divide was not impermeable; Bill Russell, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson that the permeability could be selective in what it let through at any given time).

Still, once you take into account the color divide, the machinery of it was still pretty general. How celebrity operated, who it worked to reach and how it was used to make art, money, power. And the divide weakens, in fits and starts and oh so slowly, but there is yet hope while we live, right?

Ok, now where does it go, when you can reach out and touch the world?

No clue, have I, no idea here except that celebrity is now no one thing. It's not even multi-faceted, in the way that say Frank Sinatra or Louis Armstrong could be both intensely private and public simultaneously.

It's multi-component, now. Mixing, matching, in flux. Divorced from money and power one minute, inalterably wrapped up in it the next.

Still always dangerous to the ones who attempt to ride the wave. That part I think will always exist where adulation is sought, and returned.