I can’t help feeling disappointed observing the glee many people are taking in the ‘battle’ to get Rage Against the Machine to Christmas No.1 over the usual syrupy X-Factor ballad. Yet again, a virtual-pitchfork wielding mob springs up on Facebook/Twitter, overexcitedly spitting bile about ‘sticking it to Simon Cowell’ and clearly relishing being members of some achingly cool, subversive arbiters of taste and democracy.

But since when was buying 3 copies of a track (that you may well already own) to push it artificially to Number 1 a victory for democracy? And when did subverting the mainstream Saturday night TV populism of X-Factor become about a pop music popularity contest of equally silly, mainstream proportions?

I suppose at least people are buying the music. Downloading ‘Killing In The Name Of’ from a torrent site would kinda miss the point (but I bet it’s still doing briskly on those too this week). Much has been made of the fact that Sony is behind both of the No.1 contenders anyway, so can’t lose, no matter how much ‘people power’ is exerted with a couple of lazy clicks of a mouse.

Odeous as Cowell can often seem, slagging him off on social networks just makes the “I’m buying RATM, yeah!” brigade seem more disenfranchised rather than powerful. Downloading singles is not ‘sticking it’ to any ‘man’. This over-excitement feels like the early days of email, when it seemed incredibly big and clever to send jokes to all your contacts. As the platform (or rather, its users) matured, the childish approach to its new thrills wore off. In 2010 we can expect plenty more mobs to spring up, since the social web is such a new cultural phenomenon. You get the feeling the possibilities are only just beginning to be realised.

Yes, this does give ‘the people’ some considerable new empowerment – the freedom of speech Twitter mob against Trafigura highlighted just how difficult it is for companies attempting to silence the free press – but the faux-rebellious #ratm4xmas campaign also proves how easy it is to mobilise huge numbers of people to join a ‘cause’ they have not thought very much about.

Culturally this is hugely negative. Comedians fear making their most cutting jokes without a ‘campaign’ springing up (@jimmycarr was satirising the lack of weapons for troops but still got pilloried for mocking disability) and politicians have to speak in such bland, cautious terms as to render most interviews pointless. And socially there are potential problems too. With the mob acting as real-time moral police, will groups advocating attacks on ‘peados’ whip up the necessary critical mass online to go and start throwing stones at the local ‘loaner’ without checking the facts of the case – almost certainly.

But this is all inevitable cultural fallout from the rapid assimilation of powerful new communications technology into the core of our daily lives. The mobs will spring up, but the excitement that a Christmas No.1 mob, or a ‘let’s get a rich celebrity sacked’ mob, and particularly the more extreme, hate-driven mobs can bring will surely wane once we’ve all got over how easy it is to make a shallow statement by adding your name to a Facebook group.

What interests me is what comes next. When we’ve collectively grown tired of the latest example of ‘people power’ hitting the headlines, how will these tools be used properly? Simon Cowell’s own ideas of a political X-Factor sound more than a little scary, but he certainly knows that asking the crowd in real-time is going to be far more significant in how we are governed, and by whom, in the near future.

And what forthcoming technological developments will have come along by the time we’ve all got used to these latest ones anyway? The playing field is likely to have changed repeatedly before we’ve had a chance to get comfortable. Living in this new world will require a high degree of media savvy of us all. So, if #ratm4xmas acts as the UK’s ‘email joke’ moment in the evolution of social media campaigning then it might yet prove to have had a little bit of substance. And ok, it has belatedly become a charity fundraising project too, so I don’t want to sound entirely like Scrooge here. Merry Christmas!