Has the age of effective protests passed?  

That is not an easy question to answer.  There was a time when democratic world leaders had a sense of duty, obligation and service and exhibited shame when they failed in any of those areas.  

Those failures were often brought to light by protests from the population and of course media coverage of those protests.  

But in the current global environment democratic world leaders by-and-large are either resistant or outright deny any culpability in the face of obvious truths and offer only a series of talking points with their true values being exhibited in their actions - often contrary to the lip service they provide.   

In the internet age - there is literally an overabundance of media coverage and the more media companies there are the more options people have to choose how/where they consume their information.   This overabundance of options has led to greater divisions as there are more and more options for people offering extreme views as every media company seeks to grab a larger "piece of the viewership pie".   This growing divergence in the internet age has exasperated the divisions of population as everyone is now "selling"/forcing  ideas instead of building consensus and using the art of persuasion.  

This loss of consensus and the art of persuasion has caused irreparable damage.    

The sad thing is no one cares.    People only care about staking out their subjective opinions and anything to back them up.  No one is listening. 

When no one is listening you cannot build consensus and there is no art of persuasion. 

In that environment can protests bring about change?

The protests I've seen here in America in the past 30 years have largely been ineffective.   Oh sure they get a lot of media coverage.   But they have not actually "moved the needle".    There is no moral imperative in these protests it's merely people shouting "I'm right and you are wrong."  

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal."  I Corinthians 13:1

So nothing changes.

People show up for protests for a day or two, or over the weekend and then feebly return to their useless daily existence, their jobs, their daily realities. 

In order for protests to have actual effective change they must start from a basis of love for others and the protests MUST be sustained.  But I don't see that happening any time soon.   It would mean to protest would entail actual personal sacrifice maybe even losing one's job to keep protesting.   That will not happen unless the economy tanks when unemployment skyrockets  due to corporate cutbacks and there will be no federal assistance to help people.  

I certainly do NOT want to see that happen but I think things will have to get a lot worse before effective change actually happens.   

We're just shouting at the ground.  Just more background noise.