On the couch for weeks at a time with back pain, I had a hard time concentrating on useful and relevant pursuits. Yes I had Netflix and Amazon Prime as well as audio books and printed books to entertain me but I couldn’t concentrate on quality content. I turned to commercial TV. I think it was a throwback to childhood when I would be sick and allowed to watch daytime TV. It’s vapid so no brain cells were used in the hours of watching and recuperating.
Infomercials were particularly mesmerizing in this invalid phase. They held some sort of perverse fascination over long stretches of time. They offer so much for so little. Of course I want my hair to be shiny, or straight or curly! Yes, my face needs lifting, sculpting and de-wrinkiling!
I would watch the first 10 minutes of some AMAZING product, and then wonder if it were true. When you want to the know the truth about something, what do YOU do? Google! I would look up the reviews about the product to see what real users had to say about the validity of the product. Amazon had extensive reviews to browse. I like that I could read what the 5-star vs the 1-star reviewers had to say. And people had a lot to say about everything, as they do in the comments section of anything online. I even went to the you-tube video of the product to read those comments (“you are so pretty” the commenter would say about the model in the video – like the model would read the comments.)
I started purposely looking for infomercial programming so I could have a new product to research. Dermawand, Frownies, MT Roller, Skineance Total Volume Hair: fascinating marketing, claims and reviews. What we will believe so we can look 30 again. I would settle for looking 40 again.