There's a lot of "signing off" going on all the time in the legal profession, so this story deserves some attention. In The Atlantic's "Signing Off: The Slow Death of the Signature in a Pin-Code World," University of Toronto professor of semiotics and anthropology points out the importance of signatures in human history:
"We've always marked our existence," says Danesi. "Tribal cultures left the communal mark, or the kinship mark, on their surroundings. The mark could have been the figure of an animal, or a tree, or anything in their immediate environment. And that mark meant this group of people was a family."
But the bottom line is that PIN-code transactions are "much less susceptible" to fraud than signatures, and the signature as a mark of authentication is losing ground. This piece from the July 2001 Michigan Bar Journal nicely marked the moment when state laws began to acknowledge that times are changing. And the abandonment of the teaching of cursive handwriting surely plays is more handwriting on the wall.
