I came across this review of Superfreakonomics and was pleased for a few moments. I learned that the authors had ill-advisedly chosen to use a chapter of their book to call into question the importance of global warming and that an “extensive uproar” ensued online, causing the book’s “public demise” and providing “a huge victory for democracy and common sense”. The article was full of links to the book’s detractors online but I have to say I had not heard of the criticism of the book before now so I checked out Amazon to see how it had fared.

Well if being the sixth most popular book on Amazon makes it a failure I hope my books do as poorly! Perhaps however this reception was in spite of a visible storm of protest and controversy around the book? Well I did find mentions of there being a controversy but when I Googled for “superfreakonomics global warming” I found a sympathetic review by Kevin Kelly in the Mercury News, the authors’ own “global warming fact quiz” and only then a short Atlantic Monthly piece which takes a moderately hostile line.

Alas, what Sahil Kapur the author of the piece I found in CampusProgress seems to fail to appreciate is that just because criticism of Superfreakonomics is filling up his RSS reader it doesn’t mean that those views are being encountered directly or indirectly by the public. The power of the mainstream media and of old-fashioned tools to influence public opinion like book promotion tours cannot be easily undermined by blogging alone.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Current events, Politics, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.