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.
Introduction
In my last video, I basically went through and reacted to the top universities in the UK, and you know what, I thought it’d be interesting if I did my own rankings, because rankings are all bullsh*t [BEEP] anyway – why not do my own? (Tier list, 2M75sEb57m4)
These are the words of Clouds, a sharp and witty student vlogger with a popular YouTube channel where she covers university life, careers in consulting, and general lifestyle. In this specific video, Clouds is filming herself ‘tiering’ a select group of universities based on her own opinions and experiences. The video builds on an earlier one where she films herself reacting to an ‘official’ university ranking, published by a private company and circulated widely. What Clouds does is not unusual, especially among students and those on their way to becoming one: YouTube content that tries to make sense of which university is ‘better’, ‘worse’, or ‘the best’ thrives alongside a plethora of media that seek to aid prospective students in their choices.
Due to their potential to simultaneously inform, entertain, and provoke a response, rankings especially appeal to vloggers seeking to maximise audience attention and engagement. Ostensibly straightforward and practical, rankings make headlines, attract clicks and influence industries. While common to social media, rankings are neither native nor exclusive to them, deriving part of their appeal from their ubiquity in the media landscape. Whether we encounter them in a printed magazine, a website, or on TikTok, they emerge as a recognisable form that is simultaneously distinct and thus different from, say, the narrative review, and familiar in that we almost instinctively know how it works. This points us to consider the ranking as a genre, which operates dynamically between conventions, expectations, and rhetorical purpose: that is, between features that make it distinct as a form of communication, what their creators and audiences expect it to be like based on their earlier encounters with this particular form, and the purposes that the form serves (Lüders et al., 2010). These conventions and expectations will additionally be shaped by the medium’s technological affordances (Postigo, 2016), and by other genres that circulate on the medium in question (Lena and Peterson, 2008).
Scholars writing on genres in the context of social media have repeatedly called for deepening our understanding of how algorithmic, networked ecosystems of platforms shape genres (Amit-Danhi and Shifman, 2018; Nicoll and Nansen, 2018). Such scholarship has unfurled their pre-digital roots (Bliss and Nansen, 2023), articulated their communicative purposes (Trillò et al., 2022), mapped how users perceive them (Hallinan et al., 2023), and exposed how users shift generic conventions (Miltner, 2014) through playful mimesis (Nicoll and Nansen, 2018). We seek to add to this body of work by examining how the ranking genre’s rhetorical purposes are transformed through remediation on social media (Bolter and Grusin, 2000; Deuze, 2006). To this end, we look at how the ranking genre is remediated by student vloggers 1 on YouTube through two related types of content: (a) the tiering video and (b) the reaction video.
We argue that a genre lens can help us see how vloggers leverage the appeal, familiarity, and effectiveness of rankings, while simultaneously undercutting them through often humorous critique. We employ a move analysis (Swales, 1990) to show how this is achieved through verbal and non-verbal semantic features and associated rhetorical purposes (Tardy and Swales, 2014). This remediation is remarkable because it draws on the social form underpinning the ranking – the hierarchy (Levine, 2015) – in order to simultaneously accept it and reject it, take it seriously and make fun of it. As such, we document the way in which vloggers offer new forms of evaluation, in particular by eroding the cardinal essence normally assumed in ordinal lists (Fourcade, 2016). We demonstrate how remediation in social media has the potential not only to make visible genre work performed by the genre’s broader discursive community, but in doing so also to reconfigure the rhetorical premises that characterise the genre in the first place.
Ranking: the genre and its affordances
A genre is a form of social communication that responds to a recurrent situation and gives rise to a ‘typified rhetorical action’ (Miller, 1984: 151). To its users, genres function as recognisable frames of reference that generate a sense of stability while allowing for some innovation and creativity (Lüders et al., 2010). Recognising the ranking as a textual genre that facilitates choice thus allows us to discern how ranking as a communicative action circulates between different stakeholders and media, and how it is maintained, elaborated, or modified through said circulation (Yates and Orlikowski, 1992).
Despite their malleability, the conventions and expectations that accompany specific genres often come to appear as naturalised features of the social environment they purport to reflect. This is because the forms that underpin them have more staying power: forms are ‘configurations and arrangements [that] organise materials in distinct and iterable ways no matter what their context or audience’ – they afford ‘repetition and portability across materials and contexts’ (Levine, 2015: 13–14). The social form that underpins the ranking is the hierarchy, which affords distinct ordering potentials that impose a relatively rigid structure of possible social relationships, and by definition constructs inequalities (Levine, 2015).
The higher education context provides a clarifying example of how a genre can be naturalised through circulation. While we may think of the outcome of university studies as a diffuse phenomenon, looking at university league tables, we are nudged to see it as a zero-sum game in which achievement, typically measured in graduate prospects, is unequally distributed among universities. Scholars have documented in some detail how ranking providers have normalised ranking as a mode of comparison through repeated publication (Brankovic et al., 2018), associated events and conferences (Lim, 2018), and explanatory articles (Hansen and Van den Bossche, 2022). These practices create a genre chain (Mäntynen and Shore, 2014) that, regardless of their uneven presence or relevance across disciplines or world regions, stabilises expectations around formal rankings 2 and shape the higher education sector in their image (Hazelkorn, 2015). In a discursive community of higher education actors – which includes higher education institutions, current and prospective students, consultancies, and policymakers – rankings have thus long been recognised as relevant enough to impact student recruitment activities (James-MacEachern, 2018) and even countries’ immigration policies (P. A. Media, 2022). Crucially, despite variance in regional and disciplinary significance (Hazelkorn and Mihut, 2021), their salience in the global university sector naturalises the idea of the sector as a competitive status order (Brankovic, 2018). We thus posit that the ranking acts as a stable genre across contexts (Swales, 1990).
Yet genres are not impervious to challenge, competition, and collision. Rather, their expression is a result of a negotiated formation. Organisational and literary scholars have shown how tensions between actors and their goals can play out through genre resistance, mindfulness, revision, and creation (Devitt, 2021), genre change, subversion, and hybridisation (Baylon and Barros, 2023), or generic integrity, appropriation, and creativity (Schoeneborn, 2013). This work does not quite capture, however, the transformation of a genre as it crosses media boundaries and intermingles with Internet cultures. As previous studies have highlighted, a key feature of digital genres is that they are formed through ‘collective imitation’ in the ‘affinity spaces’ constructed by platforms, that is, the spaces where shared interests lead to participation and a sense of affiliation (Nicoll and Nansen, 2018: 2). We want to argue that a more fundamental transformation of ranking is afoot when such collaborative discursive activity seeks to come to grips with the genre.
We posit that rankings undergo a process of remediation, understood as ‘the representation of one medium in another’ (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 45). Bolter and Grusin show how in digital media such processes tend to follow a ‘double logic’ where the (new) medium paradoxically leans into its hypermediacy (the highlighting of the media construct, as we will see both reaction and tier list videos do) to vie for greater immediacy (the attempt to efface the medium, as we see in the naturalisation of the ranking). The role of the creator is key here, for Deuze (2006) argues that remediation equals ‘adopt[ing] but at the same time modify[ing], manipulat[ing], and thus reform[ing] consensual ways of understanding reality’ (p. 67). We are therefore interested in exploring how the remediation of the formal ranking can both affirm and undercut the hierarchy as a social form that is considered inherent to the genre. It is this discursive negotiation – that is to say, the collision of the hierarchical form as expressed in the ranking genre with the networked knowledge that characterises social media – that we seek to expose by looking at how YouTube vloggers redeploy formal league tables for their own purposes.
Ranking on YouTube: the reaction video and the tier list
Student vloggers have responded to the demand for insight into universities by harnessing various social media genres to parse and make sense of their experiences and choices. For example, they might post ‘A day in the life . . .’ footage and other kinds of videos to showcase (ideal-)typical experiences for imagined prospective students. Other content in their genre repertoire (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994) include popular formats such as ‘spilling the tea’ (i.e. gossiping) and ‘how-to . . .’ (. . . get into Harvard) guides. These genres thus perform ‘cultural work’ (Siles et al., 2019: 2): they are earmarked by and cater to the tastes of specific social groupings (Trillò, 2023), who recognise and make use of such categorisations (Hallinan et al., 2023). In this case, student vloggers make use of the social media genres at their disposal to harness the attention of student audiences and unpack higher education experiences. Two such genres are the focus of our study because they draw on formal university rankings: the reaction video and the tier list.
Reaction videos are a popular YouTube genre where the creator records their ‘spontaneous judgments and criticisms’ (Xu et al., 2016: 111) upon viewing other content. As a form of meta-media (Bliss and Nansen, 2023), they aim to showcase ‘an immersive, earnest and unambiguous, emotional response’ to an everyday occurrence or piece of media as it is experienced by the vlogger (Bliss, 2022), sometimes demonstrating an ‘affective investment’ in the subject (Oh, 2017: 2274). Reaction videos challenge demarcations between production and consumption by making consumption the object of the production (Kim, 2015; Oh, 2017). Our vloggers typically ‘react’ to a ranking by sharing their screen and scrolling down the ranking website. They reveal institutions row after row as they emerge from below the fold, ostensibly for the first time. A small window overlay shows footage from their camera, which allows the audience to observe their body language as well as hear their commentary. This is known as genre embedding, where one genre recontextualises another through its quotation (Mäntynen and Shore, 2014), but it is also a form of hypermedia, where the embedding of the medium into another makes it visible as an act of representation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000).
Tier list videos are an equally prolific YouTube genre. Here, creators use a banded template (see TierMaker.Com) to rank elements of a kind, often based on subjective criteria (Figure 1). The bands are typically named after a letter grading system from A to F, with the addition of the ‘S’ tier (standing for superlatives such as ‘Super’, ‘Special’, or the Japanese ‘Sugoi’) transcending the A tier. Some creators choose to give each tier a specific name (e.g. from ‘Crème de la crème’ to ‘Oh no’), but they always follow an order that implies that the top tier is the best. Each tier is coloured in a graduated scale, often from green to red (or the reverse). The universities are typically represented by their logos at the bottom of the screen, which are then dragged onto tiers as the vlogger goes through them. The vlogger determines which universities are included based on a characteristic of interest (e.g. geographic location). Rather than making an overt use of the university rankings, these videos offer an alternative where formal rankings feature implicitly and explicitly in the creator’s value judgements. The tier list template draws attention to itself as an evaluative device by design.
A typical tier list (Screenshot from 6k-_OYKyEJo).
Both reaction videos and tier lists are instances of ritualised evaluation in which persuasion is the main communicative purpose (Trillò et al., 2022). But, as rankings are adopted and adapted by this user community, the meanings associated with their use equally shifts (cf. Miltner, 2014). For example, while formal university rankings are explicitly framed as first-order observations, that is, ‘the condition under which observers focus on objective data’, it is common in tiering and reaction videos to deliberately jump between the ‘perspective of other observers’, thereby framing these evaluations as second-order observations (Esposito and Stark, 2019: 12). In other words, attention is drawn to the artifice of the ranking genre in order to expose how evaluators evaluate.
We will argue that in both reaction videos and tier lists, our vloggers are re-negotiating university status and reputation. In turn, the target audience, and prospective students in particular, are invited to translate the vloggers’ tiering and reactions into personal decisions about their future and related social action (e.g. by choosing ‘the right’ university for themselves). This reinforces the belief that formal rankings play a role in informing student choice – a belief embraced by various stakeholders in higher education, including all the major producers of university rankings (Brankovic et al., 2022) – but the ways in which rankings are transformed in the process warrant further attention.
Method and data
We used YouTube Data Tools (Rieder, n.d.) to query and download data returned by the YouTube API in response to the search queries ‘university tier list’ and ‘university ranking reaction’ (cf. Arthurs et al., 2018). We whittled down the results to include only videos relevant to the study, that is, university ranking reactions or tier lists of universities (not colleges, degrees, or other outcomes such as graduate salaries) created by individuals who are not associated with an organisation (e.g. higher education institutions, ranking houses, or the press), and produced in English, which is a dominant language on YouTube (Rieder et al., 2020). A total of 30 videos (22 tier lists and 8 reaction videos) were retained from a total of 24 creators. The videos were posted between 4 June 2019 and 3 July 2024, with lengths ranging from 1 minute and 25 seconds to 1 hour and 26 minutes.
Our sample comprises vloggers who are current or former university-goers, mostly based in the English-speaking world. Together with their university education, these individuals possess the economic and social resources to create social media content, thus suggesting a degree of privilege (Duffy, 2017). Some of the vloggers focused exclusively on university life, while others were seeking to develop a broader influencing profile by addressing topics like careers and lifestyle. In terms of geography, the videos covered the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Japan, depending on the vlogger’s context and interests. Controlling for geographic variation was not part of the sampling process because we were interested in the remediation of the genre on a platform with global reach, rather than discerning differences in the student audience’s regional and national context. 3 Indicative video titles are ‘My College Tier List’ and ‘The NEW UK UNIVERSITY RANKINGS 2022!! (Reacting to the NEW Best & Worst Universities!)’.
We performed a move analysis (Swales, 1990) to discern the semantic features that characterise each video genre and their rhetorical function (Tardy and Swales, 2014). The purpose of a move analysis is to systematically map the organisational patterns within a genre, with each move corresponding to a communicative, and sometimes rhetorical, purpose that in the aggregate give shape to that genre (Biber et al., 2007). A key methodology in rhetorical-linguistic genre studies (Devitt, 2015), the Swalesian move analysis has transcended its origins in applied linguistics due to its trans- and interdisciplinary adaptability (Cotos, 2018), and has been used in the study of digital culture, for example, to unpack promotional discourse on YouTube (Chen et al., 2023), crowd funding proposals (Feng et al., 2023), and online fraud (Juanda et al., 2024). As a flexible methodology, the nature, unit size and composition of moves depend on the purpose of the study; in this case, we defined moves based on instances where a rank (or the broader notion of ranking) was invoked. We were sensitive not only to the content of the videos but also to the richness of their form, and we coded for the use of imagery, text overlays, mise-en-scène, and audio (also see Feng et al., 2023, on multimodal move analysis). In Table 1, we summarise the moves and indicate when they are shared between reaction videos and the tier lists, and when they are unique to one or the other. These moves are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive; one passage may very well exemplify several moves with distinct rhetorical aims and functions, sometimes with a compounding effect.
Summary of moves within the three rhetorical actions.
We then proceeded to interpret and categorise these moves in accordance with the genres’ rhetorical aims. In doing so, we bore in mind Miller’s (1984) point that genres are animated by the rhetor’s understanding of an objectified social need that, when addressed, ‘provides [the rhetor with] an occasion, and thus a form, for making public our private versions of things’ (pp. 157–158). Such social motives help us see the production and consumption of genres as a conscious act, addressing particular expectations that are already in place (cf. Siles et al., 2019).
Move analysis
The guiding social motive of tier lists and reaction videos is to make sense of how universities compare to each other as expressed through rankings. Key to this sensemaking is that rankings are neither treated as unproblematic sources of truth, nor are they discarded as irrelevant. This balancing act manifests itself through three overarching rhetorical actions: (a) making sense of ranking, (b) audience interpellation, and (c) the subversion of the ranking genre. Taken together, these actions help us understand how students recognise the highly problematic nature of rankings as an evaluative device, how they engage with it, and how they claim a stake in the social evaluation of universities.
Making sense of ranking
The first rhetorical action is to make sense of ranking as a mode of comparing universities, which involves decoding ranks, interpreting them, and invoking personal experiences. A university’s formal rank is either taken at face value (Move 1.1) or questioned (Move 1.2), thus respectively establishing or rejecting rankings as legitimate and accurate sources of information. But moving beyond such evaluations, the vloggers fold these moves into in a broader effort that, rhetorically, normalises additional considerations that seem subjective (Move 1.3), but the importance of which is assumed to be shared between the creator and their audience.
Move 1.4 specifies a university’s existing student body as a key factor to consider, and in doing so, articulates the social and cultural capital associated with attending different institutions. Consider Venus Ashu’s assessment of the University of the Arts London (UAL):
The thing about UAL is, it has a lot of talented people . . . on one hand, there are a lot of people who pay for their talent. I’m literally gonna say it: they’re talented because they have money and connections. But then there are some people who actually deserve to be there. (Tier list, zAzY2gBp5qk)
The accusation that UAL admits students based on wealth as well as merit is useful gossip for prospective students, as it helps them understand the image that they might project. Overall, social and cultural capital is key to understanding why tier lists and reaction videos are popular pieces of content: they provide a conduit for navigating the implications of university choice. Who will your friends be? What network will this university give access to? Will you fit in? How will others view you? As Clouds would say, do you want to go to Goldsmiths, University of London, which she deems to be a ‘school of Hufflepuffs’,
4
or the London School of Economics (LSE), which in her opinion has . . .
. . . some, like, hella like annoying ass people . . . and they’re just always up in your face. It’s like a whole school of extroverts, they immediately go into career mode, and I’m just like, can we not just chill for a little bit? So I’m going to put them in ‘Stranger Danger’ because honestly . . . I love them . . . but they need to get away from me. (Tier list, 2M75sEb57m4a)
Clouds positions her judgement as a yardstick for social desirability, for which graduate employability is just one of many factors. By reinforcing their position as savvy readers of this social landscape, the vloggers tend to draw on both hearsay (Move 1.5) and their personal experiences (Move 1.6). Move 1.5 in particular gives the impression of having insider knowledge, even though the anecdotes often have little informational value:
. . . University of Southampton, my mate goes there. He got a job at the ground, flipping burgers when it was open. (Reaction, 3j0SPfgD3No)
The absurdity of basing an evaluation on their personal experiences is not lost on the vloggers, who often spoof the process in the tier lists. Lucas Alexander assesses Christopher Newport University in Virginia (CNU) in terms of his own athletic performance:
I’ve actually gone to a lot of track invitationals at CNU: beautiful facilities, always very well-run, but I never personally did well, so I’m gonna have to give the entire school a D tier. (Tier list, f7kiRdzfK-E)
Lucas’s tier list blurs the boundaries between earnest sensegiving and parody: the audience is expected to sift their way through and garner what is useful to them. Jokes can both be silly and serious, and this duality infuses tier lists particularly throughout moves 1.10 to 1.13.
Naming a tier (Move 1.10), explaining a tier (Move 1.11), creating hierarchies within tiers (Move 1.12), and deliberating between tiers (Move 1.13) unveil the dynamic processes of evaluation and ranking, albeit framed by the possibilities afforded through the Tiermaker template. Tiers are typically lettered, though the meaning of this lettering is often changed on the fly. After joking about the composition of Dartmouth’s student body and the university’s rural location, for example, Chloe Tan concludes:
Hence, I give [Dartmouth]
Using alliteration to rank a university subverts the ordinal logic that underpins a ranked list and frames ranking as a quasi-arbitrary, but also as a creative practice.
Not all vloggers use the letter system to label their tiers. The following quote by Said Says demonstrates both tier labelling and tier explanation (Move 1.11):
The first one’s ‘give me that student debt baby’. [. . .] It’s kind of like ya put me in 100k debt because it’s worth it. (Tier list, obNOhWoN6cE)
The naming of this top tier highlights the financial reality of studying in the United States and sets it off against what the student might gain from institutions that are perceived as elite. Tier explanations (Move 1.11) thus elucidate how tiers and universities within them compare to one another. Even though the idea of tiering is to emphasise the comparability among those within one rank, Move 1.12 – creating a hierarchy within a tier, or subtiering – challenges the notion that a tier is homogeneous:
It’s kind of weird to see Michigan and Ohio State in the same level, so let me adjust this really quick . . . [Drags a medal staying ‘1’ onto Ohio, and a bronze modal (?) onto Michigan] OK that’s a lot better. (Tier list, 6Bmehi0YB6s)
In other words, the vloggers often start from the premise that the institutions they have chosen are rankable, but frequently bend the rules of the ranking genre by revisiting their original judgement or pondering, out loud, where to place a university. Deliberating between tiers (Move 1.13) thus foregrounds how factors weigh differently in determining a tier, depending on the vlogger’s assessment, inclination, or bias. Clouds, for example, takes a long time to decide where to place the University of Arts London (UAL):
[Moving the UAL logo from one tier to the other] . . . so because of that I’m going to say it balances out, and I’m going to put them in ‘Meh’ . . . mmmmh . . . Maybe they’re . . . maybe I should put them in . . . [hovers above ‘A decent bunch’] . . . but then ‘Meh’ has no one in it. See, like, I kind of want them to put in ‘Meh’ because I haven’t put any university there yet, so UAL, I’m sorry but you’re the victim. [later in the video] Let me change UAL to ‘A decent bunch’ because now that we’ve got people in ‘Meh’, I’m okay to changing UAL. [Screen goes purple with an error beep and a text overlay read: ‘In hindsight I think I should’ve left UAL in meh’]. (Tier list, 2M75sEb57m4)
Despite being the author of the tier list, and therefore in control of the evaluation, Clouds adheres to the implicit ranking expectation that university reputation is distributed across the scale. As do others, she hovers the logo back and forth between the tiers as she deliberates, giving a visual corollary to the commenting of a university’s movements up and down the rankings that is typical for reaction videos (Move 1.8).
In reaction videos, the sense of instability of a league positioning is spectacularised through this commentary, for example, by offering predictions as the vlogger scrolls down:
Okay let’s try and guess what number 13 is going to be, what hasn’t showed up yet . . . Um maybe Leeds, I’m gonna say Leeds as number 13. Oh Birmingham. Okay, so number 13 we’ve got University of Birmingham. (Reaction, OYNVdF49iCI)
Guessing and confirming/disconfirming the guess builds suspense, but also exposes the vlogger’s perceptions of these institutions and implicit hierarchies. This continuous testing of expectation against revelation finally gives opportunities for emoting surprise, shock, or corroboration, which create drama. Much of this is verbal, but the vloggers are often aware of the entertainment value of their reactions and emphasise it visually through, for example, camera work and editing (e.g. zooming in, zooming out, cutting to close-ups). Dylan, for example, guesses that the University of St Andrews will rank after Oxford and Cambridge, but as LSE is revealed in the third position, his body language, which exaggerates shock, is reinforced as his image drains of colour, the audio of his exclamation ‘oh my Goodness’ is distorted, and the letters ‘GENUINE SHOCK’ overlay the screen (Figure 2).
Vlogger Dylan’s ‘genuine shock’ at discovering LSE ranks third (Jyqn7JJns3M).
Audience interpellation
The second set of moves encompasses the vloggers’ solicitation for clicks, likes, and comments that are typical for social media content, and which animate the attention economy (Goldhaber, 1997). Asking for the audience’s engagement (Move 2.1), however, takes on an additional rhetorical purpose whereby these audiences are framed as part of the discursive community that has a stake in the ranking genre. Lucas Alexander, for example, offers a link to his tier list template, so that his viewers can ‘follow along and rank the universities how you see fit’ (Tier list, f7kiRdzfK-E).
In soliciting the audience’s opinions, the vloggers drive home the point that rankings are also collective endeavours. Dylan puts this into practice by hosting a live video where he asks his viewers to suggest tiers for each university, and gauged the resulting overall sentiment in the chat before coming to a decision. Hosting the session was driven, he says, by the audience’s opinions of his previous tiering:
Last video I made got like 20 dislikes so, um, I’m trying to . . . I’m trying to avoid that again. I want to get a good consensus. (Tier list, rKdl1m7imIk)
In the reaction video he would publish several months later, he implies that the tiering he had done together with his viewers was ‘more right’ than the rankings made by established producers:
Let me know if you’re going to any of these universities here, if you’re at them or if you completely disagree with these rankings, because they are not always right. Our rankings that we made were completely different. (Reaction, 3j0SPfgD3No)
The audience is thus constructed – interpellated – as having a legitimate say over the rankings.
Naming audiences (Move 2.2) puts the spotlight on specific groups of individuals who may be watching, not only addressing them directly but also constructing an imagined audience that the actual viewership now partakes in. Once named, this audience can be drawn on as providing yet another factor to be considered while ranking. In an exchange between two YouTubers co-hosting a tier list, the viewer base of Trinity College alumna Queen of Quirk is interpellated and jokingly provoked:
Seán: [If] we say anything bad about Trinity [College] . . . like your audience is just gonna . . . Just gonna kill us. Queen of Quirk: I think you . . . don’t just all come at me . . . because you all . . . it’s your dream school . . . Seán: So D tier! Queen of Quirk: Straight into D tier. (Tier list, XOFI89zYQQE)
In the vloggers’ jest, rankings are revealed to have audiences with stakes in particular universities. Whereas formal rankers go to some length to appear neutral, the vloggers invite rankings to be interpreted as battles of opinion.
Anticipating the audience’s negative reactions (Move 2.3) airs potential points of contestation, which also allows vloggers to capitalise on them. Said Says draws a direct link between negative reactions and views:
I’m joking, I know I’ve pissed off sooo many people – it’s okay, it’s okay, I’ve so many people [inaudible] I’ll get like a million views on this. (Tier list, obNOhWoN6cE)
At the same time, the vloggers go to some lengths to ensure that their audiences can emotionally find their way through the ranking. By offering consolation and encouragement (Move 2.4), they provide an interpretive framework for the vast majority of students who do not have access to a top ranked university and might thereby feel disenfranchised by the genre. Despite all the attention given to rankings in these videos, Clouds paradoxically suggests students should not give them too much credence:
These leagues are completely arbitrary, so don’t, like, be sad or upset if your university isn’t ranking as high as you want it to. Basically, just don’t apply your self-worth or how intelligent you are or anything like that to these leagues because it’s, again as I said before, it’s very very random and sometimes universities just jump up and down, and never know really like what’s going behind these numbers. (Reaction, K0O0Uj_2Ai8)
Whereas disagreement and discontent are more generally expected reactions, these videos explicitly make room for such dissent. In doing so, they shift genre expectations from assuming rankings as abstracted but accurate indicators of university status, towards ambivalence: neither to be dismissed, nor to be taken seriously. Disclaiming (Move 2.5) makes this position visible (Figure 3): the vloggers acknowledge that they may offend their audiences, but they also relativise their own voices. They make clear that their assessment is likely flawed, but emphasise that in this genre, subjectivity is expected:
Disclaimer visuals (top left to bottom right: 6Bmehi0YB6s, CNRd1N93d7s, f7kiRdzfK-E and j19H_5NfAPQ).
Please note that this is simply going to be my opinion at this current time. My opinion may change as I get older, and also, this is not to offend anyone, so if you find that your university doesn’t rank as highly as you thought it would have, then please don’t be offended. This is simply for a laugh but also just to give you my opinion on what I think of each of these universities. (Tier list, 6k-_OYKyEJo)
Through these disclaimers, the YouTubers renew genre expectations by directing viewers to take them with a grain of salt. Scepticism has become part and parcel of the genre.
Subverting the ranking genre
The final rhetorical action draws on the former two in order to destabilise the premises of the ranking genre. This is where the vloggers and their audiences’ scepticism of the entire enterprise of ranking shines through: they critique audit culture, and by extension, whether it is capable of capturing hierarchy (the existence of which remains implied throughout). We identified five moves that are shared between the reaction videos and the tier lists: commenting on the basis for assessment (Move 3.1), pointing to the subjectivity of the rankings (Move 3.2), noting the general (ir)relevance of rankings (Move 3.3), stating a lack of knowledge of a specific university (Move 3.4), and arousing suspicion over ranking motivations (Move 3.5). The tenor of these critiques ranges from measured commentary to satire.
Questioning the basis for assessment (Move 3.1) includes querying the metrics that underpin the rankings, why some indicators are included while others are excluded, who the rankers are, what qualifies them to evaluate universities, and why universities’ positions in a ranking differ as a result. The ranker’s subjectivity (Move 3.2) was often used to challenge the taken-for-grantedness of ranking results. JADoes puzzles, for example, over the ordering of Aston and Lincoln in the Complete University Guide and notes that Aston’s composite grades appear to be superior to Lincoln’s, despite being ranked lower:
That is quite funny you know because sometimes this website don’t make sense to me, I can’t lie. Because look at . . . looking at Lincoln and Birmingham, they’ve got the exact same overall score but if you look at the numbers, there’s a great disparity that like . . . statistically, Aston, Birmingham, looks a bit better than Lincoln, but . . . I didn’t make the website. (Reaction, De5mzZecj9c)
JADoes signals that the ranking should not necessarily be trusted. This opens the possibility of taking creator privileges by dismissing the significance of appearing in the rankings in the first place. Stating a lack of knowledge of specific institutions (Move 3.4), forgetting their existence, or refusing to offer any commentary, for example, point to tacit social knowledge or hierarchies that are not necessarily represented in the rankings. In the reaction video, the lack of knowledge underlines the authenticity of the reaction. In the tier list, ignorance is often turned into a comedic device, and sometimes a diss. Clouds, for example, turns her lack of knowledge into a comedic moment as she tries to find the right pronunciation:
[Mispronouncing:] Chichester . . . Chichester . . . I don’t know . . . gee chester Chichester, Chichester, I think it’s Chichester, isn’t it? Chichester, I don’t know this university, I’m sorry, I don’t. (Reaction, MHkvQS0kGZ4)
Destabilising the traditional rankings genre in these ways lays the groundwork for commenting on their relevance more generally (Move 3.3). Not only do rankings not measure what they say they measure, they also cannot predict the future in the way that they imply they can: a high-ranking university degree does not always lead to a high-paying job. At the same time, rankings are perceived to play a role in a graduate’s prospects, not least because it provides a yardstick for potential employers. In a passage that also aims to reassure his audience (as seen above), Dylan provides a framework to make sense of this conundrum:
Let me say as well, guys, like these rankings are good but if you go to the best university in the UK, and you don’t put in work, you’ll get nowhere. If you go to the bottom university in the UK but you graft . . . If you graft, you’ll make it places. [. . .] Yes, if you go to Cambridge and there’s better teachers and facilities and all stuff like that, the vehicle that’s going to take you and drive you forward in life, it’s going to be . . . a Lamborghini. If you go to Bedfordshire, it’s going to be a garbage bin. But a garbage bin still goes forward, you know what I’m saying . . . (Reaction, 3j0SPfgD3No)
The most likely situation for most students is that they will have to choose between one of the many universities that are not ranked highly. Dylan’s picture of a garbage bin that still moves forward pokes fun at the University of Bedfordshire all the while emphasising that anyone can be successful: university reputation, partially constructed through rankings, does not hold predictive power over students’ futures.
The rhetorical action of exposing evaluation shows the audience what is really at stake: Who gets to evaluate whom and on what grounds? Do they answer to students, or do they answer to rankers? While rankers would argue that they hold universities to account through their complex indicators, the vloggers expose this as disingenuous and question their motives (Move 3.5). In her ‘roast’, Chloe Tan suggests UC Berkeley is included in university rankings solely for appearances:
UC Berkeley . . . The obligatory public school that ranking agencies have to put in the top ten in order to not seem too elitist. (Tier list, K0tHjlvKHjY)
Implicit in her comment is the commercial apparatus animating league tables: in her view, formal publishers know that the rankings need, to a degree, to conform to an expectation of egalitarianism and accessibility. This intent corrodes judgement, which, as Dylan offers, is pronounced by ‘the people who [. . .] have never been to university in a long time’ (Tier list, rKdl1m7imIk).
Discussion
The overarching social motive of the YouTube videos herewith analysed is not to rank universities according to ‘rigorous’ criteria, but it is to help viewers make sense and navigate the highly audited university sector, and acknowledge them as key stakeholders. They do so through tier list videos and reaction videos, thus shifting the genre expectations associated with the ranking. As Devitt (2021) argues, established genres are so normalised that their implicit worldviews can be difficult to resist, but blending these genres enables vloggers to repurpose, critique, and even provide alternatives to formal rankings – or broaden their actionability and appeal. Their videos reshape the ranking genre by simultaneously acting ‘as if’ rankings are meaningful, while also rejecting their ultimate truth value.
The first set of moves is dedicated to sensemaking; both of the existing rankings and of using ranking as way to order the higher education landscape. The accuracy of a rank can be questioned, but the purpose is not necessarily to undermine the entire ranking enterprise; instead, it is to situate it and make it legible to the audience. The second set of moves – audience interpellation – broadens out authority over the ranking across the genre’s discursive community. The vloggers name audiences and anticipate their reactions, inviting them to partake in the activity. For this to succeed, the vloggers need to displace the authority wielded by formal rankers through the appearance of neutrality, objectivity, and rigour. While formal rankers acknowledge the ranking’s limitations in accompanying editorials (Hansen and Van den Bossche, 2022), it is crucially the vloggers’ cultural position that affords them a vantage point from which such unmasking feeds a content mill. Formal publishers’ meticulous justification of rankings is frequently rendered irrelevant by the vloggers’ insistence on the value of personal opinion, and at worst called out as disingenuous through the third set of moves, which aims to subvert the rankings.
The valuation of personal opinion, as Deuze (2006: 68) argues, is a form of ‘distantiation’ that is key to contemporary forms of remediation: the vloggers assert their individuality by claiming personal knowledge of the inadequacies of ranking as an evaluative act. However, they also rely on these very structures to sustain their circulation, engaging in a disavowal that does not challenge the status quo (Zupančič, 2024). The vloggers do not ‘deauthorize’ formal rankers because they do not conclusively devalue the knowledge they produce (see Baylon and Barros, 2023: 14). Instead, they reinstate the broader community as potential co-arbiters over cardinal essences: they ‘expose the shifting terrain of power and production in visual culture, which is no longer “the domain of specialists” but instead something that is produced, distributed and shaped by online networks and participatory culture’ (Bliss, 2022: 3). As such, vloggers rarely offer a sustained critique of the underpinning social form – the hierarchy – as a suitable order to parse the higher education landscape, which helps explain why ranking persists as a genre (Hamann and Ringel, 2023), albeit transformed.
Although our analysis did not set out to systematically identify intertextual references specific to Internet culture, we found that such references were pervasive. We wish to conclude the discussion, therefore, by offering a final vignette that illustrates several moves wrapped up in an apt quotation of the reality TV show Love & Hip Hop: New York. Vlogger Clouds is tiering universities and finds herself explaining her decision not to give Brunel her top tier (Move 1.11; Move 2.3), despite speaking highly of its student body (Move 1.4). The video cuts to grainy footage of rapper Cardi B confronting Asia for disliking her. Captions equate Cardi B to Brunel, Clouds herself to Asia, and bystanders to ‘Other unis’, highlighting the public nature of such evaluations (Move 2.2) (Figure 4). In the clip, Cardi B/Brunel repeatedly shouts, ‘What was the reason?’ To which Clouds offers an explanation concerning campus location (Move 1.3), but quickly turns to spoofing the rigour usually attributed to rankings (Move 3.1):
Clouds draws on a scene from Love & Hip Hip: New York (Tier list, 2M75sEb57m4).
This list, it’s like a very complex list that takes into consideration different factors [a bull and a poo emoji appear her mouth and float away to the edge of the screen], and I’m putting [Brunel] in ‘Invite to Pres’
The video cuts again to Asia waving Cardi B away, stating ‘I don’t need to explain myself to you’ (Tier list, 2M75sEb57m4).
Clouds highlights that a focus on metrics is a type of ‘bullshit’ that rankers use to further their own objectives (Move 3.5), and subsequently closes down the conversation by asserting her own, albeit clearly subjective, authority. Like Cardi B, the way to open up this space again is to break with genre conventions; in the scene that Clouds is referencing, Cardi B is famously pulling faces, sitting on Asia’s ex-boyfriend’s lap to provoke her, and throwing a shoe at Asia. The audience is expected to be familiar with this reference, and the particularly knowledgeable viewer will remember how Cardi B bends social (and genre) expectations. In the face of seemingly unforgiving rankings, these viewers may find satisfaction in such irreverent intertextuality and the way in which they redraw genre.
Conclusion
Comparing phenomena as diverse as artworks, places, and experiences by arranging them in more or less discrete ranks is a common practice on social media video platforms such as YouTube. Viewing these rankings as a remediated genre has enabled us to explore in more depth the interaction between the conventions and expectations that genres elicit, the media that afford them, and the kind of communication they facilitate (Lüders et al., 2010).
As a genre, rankings are predicated on the social hierarchy as a form, and as such organise experience into ‘often deeply unjust arrangements’ (Levine, 2015: 82). This injustice is not lost on our vloggers. On the contrary, they capture the unease with which current and prospective students find their choices judged in the rankings – and articulate this back through remediation. This remediation is characterised, as Bolter and Grusin (2000) have argued, by the paradoxical interplay between hypermediacy and immediacy: ranks and rankings are explicitly presented as (potentially flawed) media constructs through techniques like screen sharing, providing running commentary, and the use of tier list templates, all with the aim of making that which is being evaluated more readily accessible. In an act of distantiation (Deuze, 2006), these evaluations are also rendered personal. As a result, vloggers and their audiences emerge as active members of a discursive community that has long been dominated by legacy stakeholders, thus recasting what the ranking genre has to offer.
On a final note, this analysis points to a possible conceptual blueprint for studying engagement with evaluations in a pluralised digital environment. As for any form of ranking, the claim that students ‘use rankings’ has almost an axiomatic status among higher education stakeholders (Brankovic et al., 2022) – but the details of how this is done, beyond a prima facie assumption that ranking audiences seek knowledge of ‘the best’, remains vague. Each of the rhetorical actions we have identified – sensemaking, audience interpellation, and subversion – alert us to different yet critical aspects of this engagement. Reaction videos and tier lists are popular genres precisely because our vloggers’ audiences are likely to engage in such sensemaking, discuss rankings with their peers, imagine who other audiences of rankings could be, or partake in their disavowal. This further urges us to think of everyday engagement with formal evaluators as more nuanced than usually acknowledged.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
