"Making knowledge public does not a knowledgeable public make," writes Jay Rosen in "The Limits of Investigative Journalism," a very useful essay that considers why good reporting sometimes sinks in and other times fails to matter much. He contrasts "Top Secret America," a major 2010 Washington Post series, almost two years in the making, with "the Snowden effect," the "direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden's [2013] leaks of classified information about the surveillance state in the US." He notes four elements that helped to boost the Snowden results: an interesting person to pin the story on (Snowden himself), a lively narrative arc (will he escape?), the sharp spark of secrets revealed, and the vivid evidence of government lying.

I've been thinking of this sort of collection of elements as an "elaborated web" that must to some degree be aligned already to receive and focus and amplify the right kind of event. When that web isn't in place, the words of a great prophet would fall to the stones stillborn. The early adopters can help create an elaborated web, but the stories I've looked at so far suggest that much of it already needs to be in place for a story or a protest to take off.

Jay Rosen's examples hint at how this sort of elaborated web of elements already in place must work. He speaks of the "reportorial scraps gathering mold in journalists' notebooks [that] gain new relevance" once a story has momentum. He describes the swarming instinct of major papers--always at least a remote threat--once a big enough carcass has been spotted to distract them for a time from celebrity gossip and political racehorse chatter. Ideas too need to be in place--see this brief Storify account of how one generation of activists prepares the idea matrix for the next generation, for example. Organizations--unions, community groups, religious groups, healthy institutions like the courts and the schools--have to be in place too, even though few people would see the alignment until something provokes it into revealing itself.

And why does a story not take off? There must be many reasons beyond the general principle that it did not align with an elaborated web of people, groups, ideas, institutions already prepared to respond. Washington is for many of us an alien place. Reporters and politicos can get themselves worked up over something that never catches on across the country. See, for example, Joan Didion's account of the Clinton impeachment years, when insiders whipped themselves up to a frenzy over Clinton's personal excesses but failed to make the country care. Because that passage of history was essentially an insider's game, it never played beyond Washington. The ground had not been prepared beyond the Beltway.

"Knowledge made public does not a public make," Jay Rosen's second formulation of his striking opener, may be just a little more to the point. Individuals become citizens not mainly by right but more by their ability to choose and act. The kinds of choices and actions we associate with the internet include: speaking, publishing, affiliating, collaborating, aggregating (some overlap there). These actions change a person from a private person to a citizen; they align a citizen with others and with groups and institutions; they allow a person to act as part of the elaborated web that moves a society forward; they allow a person to respond to news and to help shape the society's response to news. These internet-age skills change the masses or the general public into a particular public alive in a particular episode of history. Knowledge alone, as Jay Rosen says, doesn't transform people into citizens; we become citizens when we see ourselves participating in the elaborated web of our time. Knowledge only helps us get there.

Knowledge, then, doesn't land on our doorstep in the morning and change us. The real front page of journalism is now in the elaborated web of social media, as Tim Dunlop's well-named new book, The New Front Page, asserts. The action is there; the forces affiliate and align there and the new event animates them all, or the new event helps them align a little better in preparation for the next event, the next protest, the next leak. Jay Rosen's inquiry is very important, as we need to know how to increase the chances that good journalism and all other institutions will matter in the progress of our society.

Two other examples I have looked at: 1.) In World War II Elise and Otto Hampel could no longer live in Berlin under Hitler without protesting, and their postcard protests in some ways predicted the character of Twitter. But because they could tap into no elaborated web for communicating and affiliating, they were doomed. Brave as they were, astonishingly so, there was no structure in place to give them any chance--according to my line of theory, at least. Brief audio of their story here. 2.) In 2009 a single tweet from Alan Rusbridger, not very different than a single postcard from Otto Hampel, did operate in an elaborated web of international journalists, lawyers, activists, bloggers, and others, all in possession of research and communication skills, all able to affiliate and collaborate in a case of toxic waste dumping by a multinational corporation. Brief audio of that episode here. As a result, that single tweet lead to the overturning of a Supreme Court ruling in Britain protecting that company in a matter of a few days. The elaborated web operated as promised by the theory. These two stories helped me start to try to understand the thing I've been calling an elaborated web. And they align usefully with the project Jay Rosen has underway in his recent essay.

PS. And when everybody is writing in a corporate silo instead of on the open internet, the chance for an event or a protest to land in this kind of elaborated web and build it out further must be reduced.