So much has changed politically in Wisconsin in the last three months. It shows up clearly in this Talking Points Memo timeline of the Wisconsin union struggle, which begins with historic low polling favorability for unions and finishes with jaw-droppingly bad polling for Wisconsin's brand new governor.
The public groundswell of opposition to Gov. Scott Walker's attack on workers' rights has changed. It's gone from getting thousands of people to the Capitol every day and tens of thousands every weekend, to getting a few people there every day and 100,000 together somewhere in the state once a month or so, while mobilizing volunteers to mount and contribute to recall campaigns against Wisconsin Republicans.
The shape of national and social media interest has also changed. Last Thursday, for the first time since the February peak of the protests in Madison, "Wisconsin" dropped from the list of top tags on DailyKos, the largest community blog in the progressive netroots.
The popular #wiunion tag on Twitter no longer updates too fast to read everything, though it still sees regular use, and has been superseded by the #wirecall and #wivote tags that started seeing use as the energy of protest politics was shifted towards electoral politics.
As we're likely to be feeling the ripple of recent events in Wisconsin for a long time to come, it's a good point at which to look back at some of the early social media milestones before they're lost in the flood. Whatever else it was and is, the #WIunion struggle was mostly a word-of-mouth popular uprising, driven in large part by citizen media and email activism and inspiring people all over the country. If we're lucky, we'll see its like again.
The list of social media milestones you'll find below could have been three times as long, or more. Hopefully, it's just long enough to capture the sense of community purpose and public conversation that made #WIunion a powerful experience.
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