Appropriation Infrastructure: Mediating Appropriation and Production Work

“[P]roduction and consumption are not completely separate spheres of existence but rather are mutually constitutive of one another. What happens to a product in consumption has effects for producers and so on, in an ongoing cycle of commodification—where producers make new products or different versions of old products as a result of consumers’ activities—and appropriation—where consumers make those products meaningful, sometimes making them achieve a new ‘register’ of meaning that affects production in some way. In this sense, the meanings that products come to have are constructed in this process of dialogue - albeit rarely an equal one in terms of power relations - between production and consumption” (du Gay et al., 1997, p. 103).