literate societies

According to Harold Innes, literate societies use a concrete form to express their law and history. This means that the past is static and history cannot be changed.

An example is Renaissance Europe. Literate empires extend over space rather than time. Space is mutable while time is fixed.

Marshall Mcluhan associated literate societies with hot media. Print is a hot medium.

I would argue that any society that engages in the destruction or editation of literature/print is still literate, yet allows for an active history, thusly mutable.

An example is the National Socialist party during the Second World War. It created its own version of the past, where the members of the new regime were descended from a noble, Persian, warrior-race.

1984 gives a fun-filled projection of this abstract-come-reality. and that the states which hold power are literate societies, and that In that the a given domain was at one time controlled by non-literate societies, and that this same land is now controlled by literate societies, one may induce that the former may have been taken over by the latter.

This has happened with each advent of communication; societies which had developed writing, then alphabet, then printing, then electronic communication have each taken over spaces which did not make the necessary evolutionary advance. Meme war.