Those of you in the UK watching the Christmas Number 1 music chart battle between the X Factor winner Joe McElderry and Rage Against The Machine may or may not have realised they were watching the power of the internet in action.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to various Facebook Groups supporting Rage Against The Machine and have been hugely proactive in getting people to buy their song to keep the X Factor out of the top slot. My son Tom for example was regularly posting on the subject. There were active strategy decisions going on to discuss optimum methods of hitting number 1. How many times to buy the song from where? This is teenagers spending their (parents’ hard earned) pocket money.
Of course this is a fairly frivolous and trivial use of the internet. A bit of fun. It did strike me though that there were other far more deserving causes that could hugely benefit. Global warming for example. The world’s politicians appear to have been letting their voters down at the Climate Change Talks in Copenahagen, regardless of what spin we might be getting from them after the event.
I even thought about starting a Facebook Group on the subject. Then it occurred to me that there might already be one so I took a look. There already is one.
These are the results of a Facebook search for “Rage Against the Machine” followed by those for “Climate Change”
You can see for yourself which is the most popular.
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 476,980 fans
rage against the machine – RATM 466,612 fans
Rage Against The Xfactor 326 fans
YES…Jedward has gone!-lets get rage against the machine no.1 😀 326,991 members
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 – BACKUP GROUP 176,737 members
Rage Against The Machine 49,165 members
Slow Climate Change 55,599 members
COP15 – Climate Change – JOIN AND INVITE ALL 49,826 members
Climate Change 1,634 members
Climate Change 407 fans
The biggest challenge I think is how to get the Facebook Generation tuned into issues such as climate change so that they can make politicians sit up and listen.
PS I didn’t buy either of the singles myself. I imagine we have enough copies around hte house now though for me to legitimately have one if I chose to 🙂