It does not need to tell us what to think. But here is where journalism can play a vital role. Why are guns seen as different?This past weekend, I felt that profound sense of impotence after the latest in America’s series of mass shootings. Although mass shootings are not unique to the United States, their scope and frequency are. We know deaths would rise if we loosened seat-belt laws or car safety regulations. Yet it is inescapable that mass shootings, while the result of many variables, are inextricably connected to America’s gun laws. This can be accomplished in countless ways that defy partisan lines. With devastating frequency, mass shootings tragically underscore this fact. The Monitor does not exist to advocate for any particular policy, but for the expansion of universal values such as compassion, freedom, responsibility, or honesty, to name a few. Google Buzz was a huge hit internally because pretty much everything inside Google is (was?) public anyway and people are very tolerant of different opinions, and it never occurred to us that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.So much of American politics today promotes a profound sense of impotence – the inability to move entrenched forces, even a degree.

Similar cultural mismatches have been responsible for a few other gaffes, eg.

When we heard strange whirring noises coming from nearby computers in the office, our first impulse was 'Woah, that's really cool! We're seriously going to launch this on the home page? Can I help?' While at many other offices, if you hear strange whirring noises from an employee's computer, the reaction is 'You're fired!'

One of the factors we'd identified in the post-mortem was actually the difference in Google culture vs. We had an early sneak-peak: Marcin was a UX designer for what was my 80% project at the time, so he'd passed it around the office looking for feedback. I did one of the code reviews for the Pac-Man doodle (and actually, the part I was responsible for reviewing focused specifically on sound, so this was kinda my bad).

Google doodle pacman