As a way to think about shifts in writing and rhetoric, I want to respond to Lev Manovich's recent discussion of layers in Photoshop and Ryan Trauman's reflections on digital media.

Some of the shifting is material: "previously, physical and mechanical media tools were used to create content which was directly accessible to human senses." But with digital materials, "rather than operating on sounds, images, film, or text directly, electronic and digital devices operate on the continuous electronic signals or discrete numerical data" (Manovich). Trauman suggests that the shift to binary modes creates a layer of abstraction in digital texts. Digital spaces are more fluid and open to invention in large part because of their many material and representational layers.

Manovich suggests that these layers are a key part of software. However, when we look at digital materials, we often see a composite, an elision of layers. The digital bent toward combination belies the layers and operations that perform and create the composite.

But what if layering becomes a deliberate part of the composing process? How might we pursue a rhetoric of layers? We might start with some questions: When does complexity become cacophony? When does combination become harmony? How does layering relate to shifts in compositional states (paper sketch, text draft, video capture, blog posting, etc.)? How is layering related to composing iterations (draft, response, revision)? How does time intersect with layers, especially when layers contain moving materials like sound or video?