The author describes how the interactive study of social media's effect on the Common Core debate was designed and executed. Important findings from the study were: 1) We live in an increasingly interconnected social world. 2) Media has evolved over the last half century from a passive system dominated by a few central opinion makers to the present--a more active phase of social media in which we are the media. 3) A new activist public of social media entrepreneurs are now jockeying with more traditional advocacy groups for attention in the political space in which policy ideas incubate and public opinion emerges. All three of these are new phenomena that continue to rapidly change as new technologies influence the ways in which we learn, communicate, and interact.