Introduction

Hello Blogosphere, I am an Senior in Cornell's Information Science, Systems and Technology program. My interest is in how computing technologies facilitate different forms of communication and on the other hand, which forms of communication are helped by computing technologies and which are best performed in real life. I have contributed to two other blogs, one for the information science course Info 204 – Networks and the other was a blog I kept for my friends and family chronicling a recent road trip.
I am interested the online phenomenon of message signatures. Message signatures are sentences, often quotes, added at the end of a message. It usually has nothing to do with the message and people often keep the same signature over a long period of time. Many of the ones that I've seen are witty, but some are offensive. There is no real life equivalent of these signatures. People have favorite quotes in real life, but do not finish every point by repeating that quote. My intuition is that signatures help other readers of your post to remember you comment, and if you post several times in the same thread, this helps your readers correlate your comments. Since a quote is often easier to remember than a name, signatures could aid in online identity formation. Even though the Internet affords a degree of anonymity, some users choose to establish persistent online identities. Wallace mentions that many IRC users do not often change their nicknames even though it is technologically easy to do so.
The online space that this phenomenon takes place in is “asynchronous discussion forums” or, as they are more commonly known today, forums. This online space is old, in Internet terms, forums have their roots in pre-Internet bulletin board systems, commonly known as BBSs. Signatures often show up in e-mail messages as well. However, they do not often show up in chat rooms or in instant message conversations. Sometimes chatters will have a signature that is automatically displayed when they leave, but this is not the same as having the signature displayed at the end of every message. The main difference between e-mail and forums versus chats and instant messages is the delay between messages. Conversations through e-mail and via forum posts take much longer than conversations in a chat room or through instant messages. Also, e-mails and forum posts do not necessarily require replies, my intuition is that they are more often terminal than messages in the synchronous space of chats and instant messaging.
Time delay is probably the most significant factor in phenomenon of message signatures. Because e-mail messages and forum posts have a longer “round trip time” in terms of replies, each message is longer and therefore requires more effort to create and signatures may be a users way of owning their intellectual work.