‘Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?’: Vloggers and genre remediation

TY - JOUR

T1 - ‘Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?’

T2 - Vloggers and genre remediation

AU - Van den Bossche, Astrid

AU - Brankovic, Jelena

AU - Hansen, Morten

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

PY - 2026/5

Y1 - 2026/5

N2 - Rankings are a well-established genre for evaluating diverse phenomena, yet culturally resonant critiques of them are relatively rare. This paper examines how student vloggers on YouTube challenge and reinterpret university rankings through ‘tier list’ and ‘reaction’ videos, thereby shifting genre expectations. Through a move analysis of 30 such videos, we identify 3 rhetorical actions – making sense of ranking, audience interpellation and subverting the ranking genre – and discuss how the ranking’s remediation simultaneously rejects and reinforces hierarchy as the social form underlying it. This results in often humorous critiques where vloggers challenge ‘objective’ cardinal assumptions and posit rank as collaboratively constructed. Remediation in social media has the potential to not only make visible genre work performed by the genre’s discursive community, but in doing so also reconfigures the rhetorical premises that characterise the ranking genre in the first place.

AB - Rankings are a well-established genre for evaluating diverse phenomena, yet culturally resonant critiques of them are relatively rare. This paper examines how student vloggers on YouTube challenge and reinterpret university rankings through ‘tier list’ and ‘reaction’ videos, thereby shifting genre expectations. Through a move analysis of 30 such videos, we identify 3 rhetorical actions – making sense of ranking, audience interpellation and subverting the ranking genre – and discuss how the ranking’s remediation simultaneously rejects and reinforces hierarchy as the social form underlying it. This results in often humorous critiques where vloggers challenge ‘objective’ cardinal assumptions and posit rank as collaboratively constructed. Remediation in social media has the potential to not only make visible genre work performed by the genre’s discursive community, but in doing so also reconfigures the rhetorical premises that characterise the ranking genre in the first place.

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85218695629

U2 - 10.1177/14614448251316795

DO - 10.1177/14614448251316795

M3 - Article

SN - 1461-4448

VL - 28

SP - 1955

EP - 1976

JO - New Media and Society

JF - New Media and Society

IS - 5

ER -