Can you expand on your comment that individuals have a lot more power?
My admittedly anecdotal evidence shows that individuals are feeling more impotent with voices washed out in a wave a noise and an inability to affect anything.
My admittedly anecdotal evidence shows that individuals are feeling more impotent with voices washed out in a wave a noise and an inability to affect anything.
Add in the fact that information with which you might build a coherent argument was siloed and generally unavailable, that you had limited resources to gain any sort of expertise outside of your job, and individual "power" in previous ages appears more like the mirage of nostalgia than anything else.
This, of course, is assuming that you are a white male. If not then you had no individual power at all and were severely limited just in terms of your individual autonomy.
Back before there was social media and other online "new media" (which , together with the remaining "old media", is concentrated in fewer and larger vested interests than the media was a generation or two ago) people shared ideas person to person (the term "viral" that's been adopted in social media actually drew on a use that referred to non-media person-to-person information transmittal before the explosion of "new media").
People outside of the media establishment had voices before modern "new media".
I think your point that there is so much noise (aka "other people trying to be persuasive") that voices find it hard to get an audience is fair, but I don't see any evidence that it is harder to speak widely now and all evidence seems to point in the other direction.
Didn't say you couldn't, though for large segments of the population in-person direct communication has been to a significant extent replaced by communication mediated by (and potentially censored by) major centralized media firms.