Could social media challenge dominating approaches to organisational evaluation? In a recent paper we explore how student vloggers remediate traditional university rankings. In particular, we look at how this is done through ‘reaction’ and ‘tier list’ videos. In reaction videos, vloggers film their own reaction as they, one by one, read the results of ‘official’ university rankings. In the tier list videos, vloggers simply make their own rankings. For examples of each see here and here.
Through our research we found that vloggers engage in a sophisticated dance of confirming and undermining the genre expectations associated with traditional university rankings. They know and confirm that university rankings are, in the words of one of the vloggers, ‘bullshit.’ This, however, does not mean that they are not important. Rankings are both silly and serious at the same time.
This serious/silly tension is comedy gold for our content creators. It allows them to speak about a set of practices that are both nonsense (like pretending that rankings provide something akin to an objective measure of worth), and serious (like caring about how a future employer might perceive you as a prospect, based on the ranking of the university you attended).
Because vloggers can lean into the commenting on and creation of rankings, while fully acknowledging that there is no cardinal essence to these lists, it provides them the room they need to develop new evaluation practices that are potentially very useful to students. It provides students with useful interpretive frameworks for making sense of university choice, and richer accounts of what they can expect when starting university.
These expectations not only concern what to expect from the university experience itself, but also the perceptions of the social and institutional hierarchies that come with admission to university X versus university Y. Some of this discourse takes the form of anecdotes, gossip, prejudice, and jokes, providing a realistic picture of how evaluative schemes emerge and are circulated.
Take for example the video below, in which YouTuber Clouds posts a tier list of London-based universities based on her “personal experiences”, which turns into musings about who she likes to spend time with. This leads to categories such as “Stranger danger” for undesirables (see below) and “Invite to pres” (a term referring to a “pre-party” before the actual party) for universities that are just shy of “10/10 Recommend”.
If this has piqued your interest, have a look at Clouds remediating the way universities are ranked. If you want to learn more about the reference to Cardi B, and how it relates to genre remediation, do have a look at our paper.
“‘Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?’: Vloggers and genre remediation” was co-authored by Astrid Van den Bossche, Jelena Brankovic, and Morten Hansen, and published in New Media & Society in February 2025.