The F.A.T. Manual
122
Shaved Bieber and business censorship; an approach to providing a free, open, and neutral web that can still be censored by the individual. This piece began as a simple idea and spurned a public outcry of polar views on technology, pop culture, and online messaging mediums. In two weeks time, the popularity of this piece garnered over 100,000 video views, 85,000 blog views, hundreds of comments, multiple press mentions, and tens of thousands of tweets. After the piece began to grow in popularity, the hate mail and fan mail began to pour in through comments, tweets, and emails. Documentation of fan mail became important dialogical reminder of the effects of censorship, and the Tumblr blog <shavedbieber.tumblr.com> was created for this documentation effort, from the accolades to the death threats. After Shaved Bieber, Greg Leuch released for F.A.T. other popular blockers, including China Web Boycott (May 2011), conceived as a response to Ai Weiwei detention, that prevents the user from surfing into Chinese web territories; Dash-Out, the Kardashian Blocker (November 2011), made when celebrity Kim KardashianĘźs marriage filled up gossip news with its gorgeous ceremony, romantic honeymoon, million dollar licensing fees, and everything in between; and Olwimpics, the Olympics Blocker (July 2012), a colorful blocker that during the Olympic Games allowed web users little interested in athletics to protect themselves from Olympics related content censoring it with fields and strips that randomly used the Olympics logo colors (blue, black, red, jellow and green). More recently, this interest in personal censorship produced the â&#x20AC;&#x153;meta applicationâ&#x20AC;? Pop Block, a tool that wants to help users manage their content bubble, by allowing them to control content visibility while browsing the web. Blocking and altering content is notably achieved through advertising blocking extensions, but the everyday web content we consume contains many more things we may wish to see or not see. By launching a customizable keyword management service, Pop Block gives users the ability to control their engagement with content while browsing by highlighting or blocking content. This approach allows users to manage a list of keywords that synchronize wherever they have installed the extension. Pop Block can be found online at <pop-block.com>, and is available for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and (even) Internet Explorer.