People have always multi-tasked in church. It’s just looked different through the years. Rarely do people sit and genuinely give their full attention to the whole of a church service.

People multi-task internally, by thinking about what they are cooking for Sunday lunch, or about the dream car or house they want to buy someday, or wondering why the vicar hasn’t noticed he’s got breakfast in his beard. This kind of multi-tasking is invisible (unless of course, your eyes glaze over and drool starts coming out of one corner of your mouth. At that point people tend to cotton on).

A more obvious form of multi-tasking is external, where people ‘take sermon notes’ and are scribbling away during the meeting. But who’s to say what is being written in these notebooks! A stealthily hidden page of Sudoko? A game of hangman? The weekly food shopping list? Yet somehow, due to the normalcy of people taking sermon notes on paper, this kind of multi-tasking is smiled upon as positive and admirable.

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Last week, Steve Jobs stepped down as the CEO of Apple. Tim Cook has been appointed as his replacement. Jobs will now be Chair of the Board and still involved in a major way with all things Apple.

It’s had an interesting effect. There’s a lot of sadness – showing how deeply we respect and like Steve, and how his innovative creativity has made Mac such a beloved brand to so many of us.

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Check out this fascinating video! Cornell University’s ‘Creative Machines Lab’ have created a ‘ChatBot’. It’s a computer program that mimics human conversation. Their aim is to create something so intelligent and convincing, that a human could be in an audio conversation with it, and think they were talking to a real person.

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The past couple of days, London has been in chaos as rioters caused havoc in the streets. Mainly under the cover of darkness, fires have been started, petrol bombs thrown and bricks and rocks used as weapons. Whole areas of the city have been cordoned off. It’s spread to Birmingham, Leeds and other areas, with copycat responses breaking out and damage being caused.

I’m blogging about this on CyberSoul, as social media and technology have played their part in this rioting. Technology can be used for good and bad, and the riots are an interesting portrait of both.

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One of my childhood pics!

Yup, that’s a photo of me as a little girl! I included it here, as this post will explore the crazy reality that we are the last generation who will be able to remember a time before the internet. What an amazing thought! Kids are already incredulous when I explain to them that texting, Google and online gaming didn’t feature in my childhood.

On August 6th, 2o years ago in 1991, the first ever website was published. The author was Tim Berners-Lee, a worker at CERN.

CERN reminisce of it, saying: Continue Reading…