The Remixing Dilemma: The Trade-off Between Generativity and Originality
This addresses the design of peer production systems for amateur creativity, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theoretical work.
The paper investigates the trade-off between generativity and originality in online creative communities, finding that factors like moderate complexity and prominent authors boost generativity but reduce originality in derivatives, based on data from the Scratch Online Community.
In this paper we argue that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality in online communities that support open collaboration. We build on foundational theoretical work in peer production to formulate and test a series of hypotheses suggesting that the generativity of creative works is associated with moderate complexity, prominent authors, and cumulativeness. We also formulate and test three hypotheses that these qualities are associated with decreased originality in resulting derivatives. Our analysis uses a rich data set from the Scratch Online Community --a large web-site where young people openly share and remix animations and video games. We discuss the implications of this trade-off for the design of peer production systems that support amateur creativity.