The New York media-ecology organizer — Fordham professor, convener of the 1998 Legacy of McLuhan conference and a founder of the Media Ecology Association out of it. Bob owes him a platform (the "Holeopathic Quadrophrenia" paper was written for that conference) and places him, without apparent contradiction, in the diasporic school whose limits the same session spends an hour describing. Dialogue 79 is where both readings sit side by side.
Across the dialogues
Moves from the man who organized the room Bob spoke in to a position Bob argues against — placed inside the diasporic roster and then named, twice, as the reader who did not have Finnegans Wake, which converts a conference host into the near edge of the divide Zingrone drew
Strate is entered into the roster of the fourth school, between Postman and Powe — which places the organizer of McLuhan's institutional revival inside the group Bob faults for keeping Gutenberg's values.
"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
The school's failing is dated rather than absolute — Bob's charge is lateness, not blindness: they stay in media terms and reach the digital only recently, which is the gap Zingrone stepped into.
"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
Bob reads Zingrone's introduction to The Legacy of McLuhan as aimed at the very conference that produced it, with Strate standing for the side of the divide that lacked Finnegans Wake — the criterion by which the archive keeps sorting McLuhan's readers.
"So when he wrote that addressing the Lance Strate and these guys that weren't aware of Finnegans Wake at all, I know he was thinking of me and him."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:29:18
Connections
One of the five Bob names in the fourth of his six schools of Media Ecology.
Convened the 1998 Fordham Legacy of McLuhan conference, out of which the Media Ecology Association was founded — the occasion for Bob's own "Holeopathic Quadrophrenia" paper.