Bob Stein
Utne Reader
Bob Stein is the Friedrich Engels of interactive media -- a
capitalist entrepreneur with leftist convictions and a hot company
on his hands. The Manhattan-based Voyager Company creates CD-ROMs
and floppy disks that turn serious books by the likes of Stephen
Jay Gould and Art Spiegelman into sound-and-sight adventures and
make most of the rest of the glitz-and-game-driven interactive
media world look cheap by comparison. Living on the border between
print and megabytes, Stein holds out for thoughtfulness, humanity,
and cultural significance in multimedia.Calling a successful entrepreneur in a high-technology industry
a 'revolutionary' may be a rhetorical tic of business journalists,
but the word is spot-on for Bob Stein. He's both the former
publisher of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA's weekly paper,
Revolutionary Worker, and the cofounder, in 1984, of The
Voyager Company, a healthy Manhattan-based capitalist enterprise
that began the consumer CD-ROM revolution. Voyager publishes
high-quality, thoughtful multimedia CD-ROMs--discs that unspool
texts on computer screens and offer supplementary goodies (moving
and still pictures, recorded sound, sublayers of text) at the touch
of a key or the click of a mouse.
Switching his struggle from the streets to the digital frontier
seems to have come easily to Stein, 49, for whom the effort to help
create what he calls 'a diverse and exciting electronic culture'
means empowering writers and readers in new ways.
After giving up political work in 1980, Stein took a job with
Encyclopaedia Britannica, crisscrossing the country researching the
impact of the new digital technology on teaching and learning. That
led to a consulting stint at Atari and the conviction that even
though entertainment-industry types were hot to dominate the
emerging multimedia world, there could be room for 'a company with
a strong recognition of the role of the author, producing texts
with a clear and serious point of view. Stuff with an edge,' as
Stein sums it up.
Voyager's maiden voyages were 12-inch laser discs of great
films--King Kong, Citizen Kane. Then in 1989 Stein and
company brought out what's generally considered the first consumer
CD-ROM, a multimedia guide to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In the
years since, Voyager has produced a flood of grown-up titles,
including an interactive Hard Day's Night; Who Built
America?, a people's history (you can click to hear labor songs
and personal narratives) that's particularly dear to Stein's
activist heart; a Stephen Jay Gould book on Darwin; and Art
Spiegelman's pathbreaking comic Maus.
Stein's take on Voyager's role in the digital revolution is a
careful blend of humanism, historical sense, and anti-authoritarian
conviction. 'Hundreds of years ago,' he says, 'life was visible.
You could go down to the blacksmith's shop and watch the guy shoe a
horse. Nobody knows or sees how things work now; technology is
hidden from us. That's where I think multimedia can come in--by
giving an author a broader palate to work from. If something can be
more impactful by being shown than written about, then it's great
to have that option.'
At the same time, he takes a stand against engulfment by images.
'The entertainment industry wants to make all CD-ROMs more or less
like movies,' he says. 'We stand for the idea of maintaining a
space for the stuff that has to be in print--the thoughtful and
more abstract material. It's a matter of maintaining choices, a
matter of maintaining democracy in the electronic world.'