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we were stunned by the image shown above, a photo taken of an 18 afghan woman mutilated by the taliban that recently graced the cover of time magazine. while we had already heard the story, we read about an interesting point made in this post by dave pell at tweetage w@steland. in this modern age of short, rapid fire bursts of new information, are we unwittingly censoring ourselves from what we simply do not want to think about or, in this case, see?

according to pell:

this is in part a statement on the significance (or lack thereof) of magazine covers in today’s media. but it’s also a statement on the way we can collectively repress the data we don’t want to think about. even though we are immersed in shared words and images, it’s still pretty easy to miss the big picture."

pell referred to this concept as "mass avoidance through social media". a quick stroll through our own personal social media feeds showed us exactly what we think he was writing about. while our live feed was chuck full of "relevant" information, it was only through delving down into the actual posters’ pages themselves that we saw what it was that we were missing. social media is about what’s happening "right now", and comes at the price what’s happening over time. good point, dave.