Advertising plays on the broad feelings of alienation (defined as an individual's frustrated or estranged responses to economic and sociological phenomena which affect that individual's place in society) which are endemic to the American consumer society and are, in Marxist views, symptomatic of any capitalist system. By generating anxieties and dissatisfactions and then offering products as escape hatches, advertising fuels the cycle of consumerism. Modern advertising began in the last half of the nineteenth century and was often targeted at the newly emerging consumer immigrant class who found earning and spending a way of combatting the loneliness of the ethnic ghetto. Contemporary electronic and print advertising furnishes many clear examples of five major types of alienation: (1) powerlessness; (2) meaninglessness; (3) normlessness; (4) isolation; and (5) self-estrangement. American consumption culture thrives on the results of this advertising, and will continue to do so until individual perceptions change and no nation needs to be number one in the world. (ARH)