Marshall McLuhan's co-author on The Global Village (1989), the posthumous book drawn from mid-1970s work, and a teacher at Niagara University. He recurs in the series mostly as a citation attached to that book's angel/robot distinction; dialogue 61 is the one session that treats him as a person, and Bob's interest there is not literary but circumstantial — the tetrads he brought, the year the book lost, and the intelligence preoccupations that mark where McLuhan's own attention had turned. Not to be confused with the Canadian writer B.W. Powe, who appears separately in dialogues 39 and 55.
Across the dialogues
Moves from a name on a title page to a figure with consequences — Bob makes him the hidden pressure behind the delayed publication of The Global Village, and reads his intelligence preoccupations as the reason McLuhan wanted him around in the surveillance years
Powers' tetrads are cast as a competitive threat inside the McLuhan estate — the reason Bob gives for Laws of Media taking 1988 and The Global Village being pushed to 1989.
"but Eric stopped it because Eric was putting out Laws of Media in 88, and he didn't want to be, you know, upstaged by Bruce Powers, who had a bunch of tetrads."
Powers belongs to the undocumented late circle — invisible to the people who thought they knew who was around McLuhan, and therefore evidence of how much of the mid-70s remains unreconstructed.
"I never heard anything about Bruce Powers when McLuhan was alive. But it turns out Bruce Powers was visiting McLuhan."
Bob reads an intelligence background off the content of the book rather than any source, and uses it to date McLuhan's own turn toward surveillance in the post-Watergate years.
"Yeah, and he was apparently former CIA."
Connections
Co-author of The Global Village (1989), the posthumous book assembled from mid-1970s material; taught at Niagara University.