Access Utah

The Women’s March on Washington organization estimates that more than more than 1,300,000 people will participate in the Women’s March on Washington or in one of the estimated 600 sister marches happening on January 21 or in the days following. (The Women’s March on Utah State Capitol is January 23).

VidAngel is Provo-based streaming service that lets viewers set custom filters to screen out content they might not like or find objectionable. VidAngel CEO Neal Harmon says that VidAngel honors two sides of a libertarian coin. “We agree with Hollywood that the director should have the right to determine how their work is performed in a public setting. That’s free speech. That’s everything America’s about. [But] once you take something into your own home, it makes sense that nobody has the right to tell you how to consume something in your own home.” Several Hollywood studios have sued VidAngel and a judge has granted a preliminary injunction against the company. In the meantime there’s a petition http://savefiltering.nationbuilder.com/ going around to ‘#SaveFiltering’ and VidAngel has crowdsourced more than 10 million dollars to help pay for their lawsuit

In his new book “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World,” Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change, and that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

There are many needs in our communities, and there are dedicated individuals and nonprofits working to meet those needs. They sometimes don’t get the recognition they deserve, and you may want to help but don’t know where and how. On the next Access Utah we’re opening the phone lines, email and Twitter to give you the opportunity to spotlight a nonprofit or individual doing good in your community.

Join us for Tuesday’s Access Utah when our topic is Fake News & Journalism in the Age of Trump.

Today we revisit our conversation from October with Rita Moreno:

Nicholas Carr started his blog “Rough Type” in 2005, when MySpace was a fast-growing social networking site and Facebook was a Palo Alto startup. Now in his book “Utopia Is Creepy and Other Provocations,” he has collected the best of those posts and added influential essays such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” which were published in such magazines and sites as The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico. Carr’s favorite targets are zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools, he says, do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse.

When Michael Copperman left Stanford University for the Mississippi Delta in 2002 - recruited by Teach for America - he imagined he would lift underprivileged children from the narrow horizons of rural poverty. Well-meaning but naïve, the Asian-American from the West Coast says he soon lost his bearings in a world divided between black and white. Trying to help students, he often found he couldn’t afford to give what they required―sometimes with heartbreaking consequences.

In her TEDxUSU talk, folklorist Lynne McNeill says “When most people think of ‘folklore’ they think of the old, the rural, the rustic. They typically don’t think of the Internet, a technology that, if anything, is commonly judged to be dismantling our culture: destroying our interpersonal skills, squashing our cultural vitality, killing our individual creativity. Surprisingly, however, communications technologies like mobile phones, tablets, and computers have become the locus of a huge expanse of contemporary folk culture. Understanding the nature of folklore helps us identify the positive elements of digital culture.”

President Obama has used presidential power under the Antiquities Act to create a Bears Ears National Monument. Some are lauding this as a courageous decision which will protect vital lands. Others are calling it an arrogant act that ignores the wishes of a majority of Utahns. Today on the program we talked about this on a special two hour Access Utah. We were joined by John Kovash, Utah Public Radio's southern Utah correspondent, Chris Saeger, director of the Western Values Project, Scott Groene, Director of SUWA, John Ruple, University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law research associate professor, Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, former Ute. Tribal Councilwoman, Congressman Rob Bishop, Bob Keiter, University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law and director of the Stegner Center, and Stan Summers, Box Elder County commissioner.