... and I'll show you who you are.
From about six years ago until about four years ago I collected signature files. I didn't know what I wanted to do with them, or why I thought that collecting them might have some worth somewhere along the line, but I was fascinated by the short glimpse that these offered me of the people who posted them. I had originally intended to post them as a page on one of my personal web sites. For all I knew, the signature files I found were temporary, serving their masters for a week or two before they moved on to something else. Yet by saving them, I froze their masters in a particular, and perhaps unintended, persona. Perhaps. Probably more often than not these were the ways in which people chose to identify themselves for extended periods of time. The witty quotes that accompanied these files were for me a telegraphic glimpse into the minds (or at least the cyber-minds) of their posters.
I don't know of anyone who has published a collection of files of this sort, though I'm sure that I'm not the only person who collected them. Why did I stop? Being busy with other tasks is always a good reason, but another is the fact that they seemed to wane in popularity. Their use seemed to reflect an earlier period in internet use; a period in which people were aware both of how easy it was to project an impression about themselves, and of the challenge that that possibility entailed. Though a signature file is attached automatically to outgoing mail, it appears that today people don't seem to feel any reason to devote the energy necessary to prepare a file of this sort. One reason for that may be that those who receive them don't read them.
My own signature file changed a number of times during that period, but ultimately settled on something temporary as being the best way of keeping me from having to make changes every week.
Go to: On regaining a cyberdentity.