I don't think the urge to be acknowledged by creators is new. In a way it is inherent in both large parts of SF fandom as well as comic fandom, where people first write or draw for fanzines (with original works) but often hope to make it pro. Getting the attention of the people you admire (showing your drawings at comic conventions to your favorite pro artist etc etc), thus happens all the time. Media fandom grew out of that, so naturally when media fans made fanzines those weren't all suddenly hidden from show creators and actors at the conventions from what I heard. And sometimes kerfuffles over that happened because actors saw zines with naked people on the covers even back in the 1970s.
I haven't been in fandom back then, but I've been in online tv fandom since the mid-1990s (in offline comic fandom before that), and as long as I remember there have been always fans who wanted acknowledgment (like getting your fanart autographed), and sometimes there were fans who were in closer contact to production than the rest of fandom for whatever reason (some worked in entertainment industry, were writing scripts or trying to get scripts accepted etc).
Another classic example of how fandom likes to get attention of creators is when fandom does charity drives for some cause one of the actors or producers supports. Many fandoms do that, like in Sentinel fandom artists and authors would do charity auctions of their works for a charity associated with the actors, so that money would be raised on behalf of fandom. There are charity zines doing the same thing too.
Then there are the "Save the show" campaigns for example, which by their very nature need acknowledgment by producers and production. And big ones raise enormous amounts of money for that. Enough for advertising in big entertainment magazines, like the Save Farscape campaign did.
Personally I like to stay away from the production side of things, and am not an actor fan at all, and by now I avoid authors and comic artists as well, because too often some statement or other made me cringe too much to ever forget and like their stuff again, but this urge to get noticed is not new at all IMO, and I don't think it started with the internet either.
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I haven't been in fandom back then, but I've been in online tv fandom since the mid-1990s (in offline comic fandom before that), and as long as I remember there have been always fans who wanted acknowledgment (like getting your fanart autographed), and sometimes there were fans who were in closer contact to production than the rest of fandom for whatever reason (some worked in entertainment industry, were writing scripts or trying to get scripts accepted etc).
Another classic example of how fandom likes to get attention of creators is when fandom does charity drives for some cause one of the actors or producers supports. Many fandoms do that, like in Sentinel fandom artists and authors would do charity auctions of their works for a charity associated with the actors, so that money would be raised on behalf of fandom. There are charity zines doing the same thing too.
Then there are the "Save the show" campaigns for example, which by their very nature need acknowledgment by producers and production. And big ones raise enormous amounts of money for that. Enough for advertising in big entertainment magazines, like the Save Farscape campaign did.
Personally I like to stay away from the production side of things, and am not an actor fan at all, and by now I avoid authors and comic artists as well, because too often some statement or other made me cringe too much to ever forget and like their stuff again, but this urge to get noticed is not new at all IMO, and I don't think it started with the internet either.