Consumption as another form of Production

As De Certeau would have us believe, in order to study (or to even begin thinking about) everyday life, we can no longer consider everyday life as “merely the obscure background of social activity” (xi), but rather as a fundamental and valuable basis of human existence that plays a major role in determining social structure. The daily activities we participate in to pass time whether it be reading, conversing, sleeping, watching television, eating, walking, etc.; these are the practices that constitute the ways in which we operate and make use of the productions of mass culture.

According to De Certeau, the ways in which we carry out these consumptions is in turn another means of production. This is a new concept to me, but I found it intriguing. For example, popular culture is not defined solely by sociocultural production nor by the elite ruling class who control these productions, but rather it is constructed by the way in which the masses (the middle class) choose to utilize these products. “Only then can we gauge the difference or similarity between the production of an image and the secondary production hidden in the process of its utilization.” (xiii) De Certeau’s research is focused on this difference that occurs between these primary and secondary productions. Can you think of examples in which we escape the dominance of mass production by straying from the rules and creating consumer production?