Letter to the editor.

To the Editor,

I was very pleased with Peter Wollheim's "YouTube and Representations of Mental Illness," featured in the September/October issue (Vol. 35, no. 2). Although Mr. Wollheim's effort was to promote the many resources that can be accessed by those suffering from a mental illness, I appreciated his sensitivity to the issues that surround YouTube as a socialized means for communication. The plea of the young Australian man asking for an authority to help consolidate the overload of available resources on the Internet poignantly displays the ambiguity that arises out of this overflow of information. This is the weakness of such media, as the author emphasizes in saying this "brings to bear the interesting question of the extent to which a medium such as YouTube might be used to create more stable online communities capable of exerting direct cultural or political influence."

YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life are all new forms of communication that pose the possibility for worldwide interaction between people of common interests. However, along with these opportunities, the strong influence of mass media and market-driven economies on the social consciousness becomes glaringly apparent. While I am pleased with the capabilities that have evolved on the Internet, I feel it is necessary for the public to increase their knowledge when dealing with such methods of disseminating information since distraction and over-indulgence have seemed to prevail.

Kelsey Ensor

New York, New York