Afwaid of da fish! #edcmooc

Yesterday I opened a hootsuite account and today I closed it. I must admit I don't really know how to work hootsuite so it may be groundless fears that led me to this decision but I have this fear of exposing too much of myself to public view and it seemed like hootsuite was opening my private home to the public.

When my daughter was about five years old, we went to see Free Willy, ostensibly a movie suitable for young children, but every time the whale appeared on the screen, she screamed at the top of her lungs "Afwaid of da fish!!"  It did no good to tell her that Willy was a good fish. The overwhelming size of this giant creature on the movie screen sent her into such paroxyms of terror that we had to leave the theatre. 

The Internet is a vast sea and for me, social media is a huge whale in that sea, one that I do not totally understand. After selecting my twitter, facebook and google accounts to appear on my hootsuite, I googled myself and to my shock, my google+ account came right up. I realized that my friends and activities were now available to the world and rushed to batten down my privacy settings there, which did, in fact, hide all of this information from the google-sphere. I had googled myself on previous occasions, in particular when job hunting, to make sure my private life was private, and had been satisfied with what came up. Now, my confidence was shaken and the only thing that made me feel safe again was removal of the hootsuite account that seemingly, had been the catalyst for this minor tsunami in my social media sea.

So, no hootsuite for me. If anyone out there in cyberspace feels inclined to explain how it works and what it is properly used to manage, I might dip a toe into the waters again. But for now, the owl is just a big, scary fish.