I was off the grid until I arrived on the social media scene just over six months ago, and Athima Chansanchai is one of my first cyber friends. I first noticed Athima when she joined the Strange Tango fan/friend page on Facebook, leaving thoughtful comments on my posts. I was impressed that she had taken the initiative to visit our innovative personal website and to look for Strange Tango on Facebook. As I vetted her profile on the internet, I saw we had several friends in common, including Sangita Chandra, a longtime friend and StrangeTango.com adviser who was the co-chair of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) 2009 convention in Boston during which our website launched. Sangita is also an Emmy Award-winning arts and culture television producer/reporter at WCVB in Boston, the flagship Hearst-Argyle station. I later learned that Athima and Sangita had roomed together some years ago at a national convention of UNITY: Journalists of Color. 

I friended Athima on my Facebook personal account, and we became a part of each other’s expansive social network. As I read her posts and updates about her life that streamed through my Facebook news feed, I was taken by the honesty and authenticity conveyed. Many Facebook users cultivate a branded persona on social media, so this raw and unfiltered individual was very credible to me. A multidimensional person was emerging: her life and aspirations shared on a continual basis with close to 1,000 Facebook friends, of which we had 82 friends in common. If she were intriguing to me—a literary stylist/conceptual artist with a finely-tuned sensibility who casts her net far and wide to curate some of the best content on the world wide web—it stood to reason that Athima would have an interesting personal history to share with the world. Indeed, she does. Continue reading Athima Chansanchai, Journalist and Do-Good Entrepreneur