Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies with Charles Berret, Linköping University

Cryptography stands in a peculiar relationship to communication itself. Whereas cryptography is typically defined as secret, private, or secure communication, these definitions neither describe the communication process nor do they capture the wide range of ways cryptography works. Instead, I define cryptography as: any communication practice designed to selectively limit the audience of a message through the inventive use of known conditions in which the communication process fails. Just as a noisy transmission may cause communication failure, encryption may deliberately render a message indistinguishable from noise to guard against eavesdropping. Next, I propose a model of cryptographic communication organized around conditions of communication failure. Building on Peters’s metaphor of communication as both a bridge and a chasm, the model depicts cryptography as a drawbridge to select the audience of a message and exclude others. The model forms a set of islands linked by a series of drawbridges, each representing a type of communication failure. The first drawbridge is recognition, in which the most basic source of failed communication is to be unaware that a message is even present. The next is access, in which some form of barrier or lack of authorization keeps one from accessing a message. Next is legibility, the ability to recognize individual symbols, followed by intelligibility, the recognition of coherent patterns, words, and syntax in those symbols. The final two stages of the model concern different stages of meaning. The public meaning of a message is the literal, surface sense intended to be understood without insinuation or ambiguity. The private meaning of a message is either selectively encoded for a specific audience, or else fully interior to our own minds. The descriptive and explanatory power of this model is illustrated by situating different cryptographic technologies and communication failure scenarios at specific drawbridges. The model also provides a critical lens to illustrate the narrow disciplinary framing of cryptography in mathematics and computer science today, in contrast to the broader range of cultural techniques that also make use of communication failure for the sake of selectively choosing their audience. I will end with a brief discussion of how this model connects to my book project, a cultural history of cryptography that examines the same narrowing of cryptography’s purview over the last 150 years.


Bio: Charles Berret is a postdoc in critical data visualization at Linköping University, where he is based in both Tema-Genus and the division of Media and Information Technologies. He completed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2019 with a dissertation on the cultural history of cryptography in twentieth-century America, and is currently developing that research into a monograph for MIT Press.

It's possible to participate in the seminar both live on campus or remotely via Zoom (see attached link).