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This article explores the relationship between consumption and communication from a cultural perspective. Starting from Edgar Morin’s “ethics of modern leisure,” intended as a theorization capable of photographing a fundamental social and cultural change, as experienced by the West after World War II, the article focuses on Michel de Certeau’s concepts of “repertoire” and “productive consumption” in constant dialogue with the reflections of Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes. In this way, we are able to identify two different types of effects of cultural fruition: one effect that is direct and immediately knowable, the other effect indirect and diachronic. In both cases, a culturological perspective of consumption still seems able to focus on some central issues in the study of media in a reconfigured technological landscape, set up as a conceptual basis for the interpretation of media phenomena in the digital age.