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

Abstract

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.