Imagine, for a bit, that you have no connections. No family to rely on, and no friendships stronger than acquaintance... but you are pretty good at computers, people pay lots of money for work on computers right?! This is a situation that plays out for trans women on a fairly regular basis. Suddenly finding themselves without anyone to rely on, but having a faint idea that one day they could be working at, idk, Apple. A lot of trans women go through this, and a lot of trans women succeed! This dynamic has created a certain culture, and that culture gets stronger with every generation of trans woman that successfully goes through it.

I'll be talking about my experience with that culture, what sort of things it creates, and where I think it's going.

As internet infrastructure advances, its becoming more easily possible to be entirely reliant on internet communities. To meet all your friends on Tumblr, get all your news from Twitter, base your professional career off of CodeAcademy. The most interesting part to me, is building up a social network (ie: a network of humans who all relate to each other in some way) online. So I'm going describe my experience as someone who spends 99% of her time within online communities, with notes about how that intersects with my being a Trans Woman of Color, and how I would like to solve some of the problems as a web developer working on a social network (ie: a website akin to facebook. link: http://quirell.net/)

Talking points:

* Discovery and growth
* Politics, rifts, drama
* Context switching
* Identity investment, selfies
* The role of bodies
* Archiving and time based effects