This week’s reading, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, highlights the changes the internet has made over the years. In chapter One, the author focuses on what the internet is really capable of and the dangers that are associated with it. About half way through Chapter One the author talks about how aggressively the internet has changed everything in our lives. From our culture to government to how to buy a quilt on Ebay, the internet has dramatically changed everything. The internet can greatly be taken advantage of and has become more powerful than we ever imagined. The artifact that I have chosen this week is a fax machine. I understand that in some instances, as for doctors and lawyers, fax machines are still relevant and heavily relied on. However, for the most part fax machines have now become obsolete and have been replaced by email. I qualify this as an artifact because is a tech product that is no longer relevant in everyday life. What a fax machine tells us about how people thought about digital technology at the time, is that people were thinking outside the box, and forging new paths that have never been thought of before. The fax machine we think of today became popular and standard in most offices in the 1980’s and 1990’s. At the time, who would have thought to send documents by converting them to electrical signals? This was a crazy idea that really showed how excited people were about technology and what it could do. I think Small Pieces Loosely Joined does apply to this artifact because the reading focuses heavily on how technology has changed so many aspects of our lives. This artifact absolutely changed everyday life for people at the time and forged a path for new technologies.