I never said anything about “hiding” meaning (versus “carrying” it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn’t saying cryptography as a field wasn’t advanced, just that this isn’t the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. “encoding” typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a “symptom” of something (maybe that’s why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you’d be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that “hiding meaning” or “carrying meaning”?
I never said anything about “hiding” meaning (versus “carrying” it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn’t saying cryptography as a field wasn’t advanced, just that this isn’t the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. “encoding” typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a “symptom” of something (maybe that’s why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you’d be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that “hiding meaning” or “carrying meaning”?