While reading the introduction to Justin Hodgson’s book Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic I immediately opened Tumblr on my phone when James Bridles account, “New Aesthetic” was mentioned. Personally, I love Tumbler. It’s one of the few social media-type apps I use on a semi-regular basis. So, naturally, I had to look through Bridle's page. What stood out to me initially was that the images and videos posted on the “New Aesthetic” blog do not seem cohesive at all. Most heavily followed Tumblr accounts have a theme or mood that they follow pretty strictly but Bridle’s does not. For example, while mine is nowhere close to heavily followed, it started out as a quarter-life crisis-themed blog where I reblogged and posted various art forms that I felt captured the feeling of being in ones mid-twenties and not having life quote on quote  “together” in the eyes of the general public. While the theme would not be obvious at first glance,  my page has a description that provides that information , Bridles does not. Hodgson mentions this on page 11 of the book when discussing the inability to define the “New Aesthetic” Tumblr page because of the varied types of artifacts found on it. 

 This prompted me to spend an hour Googling James Bridle to get a better understanding of the intention of this blog. What I found was that Bridle claims the work "deals with the ways in which the digital, networked world reaches into the physical, offline one." This was interesting to me because the medium of the New Aesthetic archive is Tumblr, so it is online. You have to be online for the app to work. Looking at this now, over a decade after Bridle started this project, it seems like the way the digital world reaches into the physical one is through the constant picture-taking or recording of everyday activities that has overtaken society. The digital world seeps into the physical one because we all have cameras with access to the internet in our hands at all times. This makes documenting the physical world for the digital world easy. But that’s kind of the point here. The documentation of the physical world through the digital is post-digital culture. And the ability to effectively communicate via digital platforms has become not only a new type of rhetoric and literacy, but a new way to spread that rhetoric.

While the focus of Hodgson's book is not social media, it does begin with the example of Tumblr as the base for the concept of the New Aesthetic. Bridle’s online archive of images and other visuals makes one thing clear: the relationship between the New Aesthetic and technology is key. A new era of rhetors exists through this relationship as they are able to connect their physical worlds to the digital world enabling images and other forms of visual media to be shared on a massive scale. Social media platforms, like Tumblr,  foster the spread of  this new rhetoric by providing people with the ability to share these connections globally. Many of us often take this for granted. We tend to forget that these visuals are effective types of rhetoric because many of them lack written language but in recent years we have seen posts on social media spark movements, advocate for social justice, and bring people together to argue for change. That is  the New Aesthetic.