Standing Out in a Crowd

A primary pillar of internet forums is anonymity. The internet itself could be considered the largest crowd in existence and the additional cloak of anonymity further erases the identity of individual users. In order to gain some semblance of identity, providing any self-identification serves to separate a user from a crowd. This image is the basic effect of ethnic self-identification and one of the two primary end goals: it causes that user to stand out in the internet crowd. This is not limited to ethnic identification because the internet's anonymity so effectively suppresses a user's identity.