Is Participatory Culture Creative?

Participatory culture, a concept in which media consumers also engage in content production, is often believed to welcome creative expression and catalyze novel forms. However, this phenomenon has rarely been studied empirically. Although previous research has shown that novelty, measured as the recombination of themes, has a critical effect on the success of popular cultural products like film and music, it remains unclear whether this is also true of participatory culture. This research narrows this gap by analyzing novelty in online fanfiction, a typical participatory culture in which people create fictional stories based on existing media sources. Using web-scraped metadata from 4.4 million stories published between 2010 and 2019, I constructed a word-embedding-based measurement of novelty that captures the atypical combination of social relationships in fanfiction stories. The results reveal a clustered fanfiction cultural space in which few stories are novel. Longitudinal novelty dynamics shows an aging effect on fanfiction production. Furthermore, social relationship types moderate the effect of novelty on story success. Whereas novel platonic character relationships popularize stories, novel romantic relationships have the opposite effect. These findings provide further insight into the limits of creativity in online participatory culture.