The Toronto poet and essayist — York University, a student of both McLuhan and Northrop Frye — whom Bob names among the diasporic school. He is not Bruce R. Powers, McLuhan's Global Village co-author, a confusion the transcripts themselves reproduce. He appears only inside the roster, never on his own account, which is itself the point Bob is making about the school. Dialogues 55, 67 and 79 each read the list.
Across the dialogues
Settles into the roster he had been drifting in and out of — named in both passes over the fourth school this session, and for the first time in company (Postman and Strate) rather than as a solitary Toronto name, which fixes him as a position in Bob's taxonomy rather than an occasional example of it
Powe enters the archive the way the school's members always do — inside a list, between Postman and Zingrone, which is Bob's evidence that these were individuals who never became a movement.
"That's the Neil Postman, the Lance Strate, the Bruce Powe, Frank Zingrone."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 40:47
Named again in the roll-call of who arrived late to the digital, which sets the school's ceiling: fluent in media terms and unequipped for the body that replaced them.
"Bruce Powe and Lance Strate, they don't get to the digital till recently."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:06:19
Connections
One of the names Bob reads out in the fourth of his six schools of Media Ecology, across dialogues 55, 67 and 79.
Not Bruce R. Powers, McLuhan's Global Village co-author — a recurring confusion the transcripts themselves keep making.