So after this stressful week, I have no idea what to write about.

If I write about my deep feelings again, I'll probably never get out of a funk. So I'll write something funny to keep my mood up. And I was just laughing recently about my research paper for my English 2 class. When I brought the topic up to my professor, I was only saying it as a joke. I wasn't being serious but, he was actually curious and wanted me to pursue the question.

Why/How do teenage girls overshare their emotions on Twitter?

All my friends in my class thought I wasn't serious either after I started my research on the topic. But I was dead serious. I thought it was a hilarious topic and something I relate to because I have to say, I am one of those girls who tweet their emotions. Especially after a bad breakup or when I'm pissed.

Now when I say "overshare" I mean to divulge more of their private and inner feelings about themselves to others. Some see this as a way to release their pent-up emotions but others see this as a burden to witness. This implicates that girls are the main subjects of oversharing and tend to react in a certain way on social media. This also illuminates the fact that social media is a platform for individuals to overshare due to the fact that it's not face-to-face interaction, so they are safe behind a computer screen and could get away with what they want.

But before we can ask How, we have to ask why. The question of why teenage girls overshare is brought up in a series of sources that I had found in my preliminary research. According to Andra Siibak from the University of Tartu in the department of journalism and communication, she explains in her paper, young people have three main reasons why they tend to overshare their private information over social media: " [1] lack of skills and knowledge; [2] sharing private things in the hopes of gaining additional popularity and gratification; and [3] carelessness caused by the illusion of online anonymity." She researched all young teens, no matter the gender, which demonstrates a gap where teenage girls are not being the main source of experimentation.

There is no clear definition or rule as to what you can or can't post as well as, what's considered "oversharing". Is it only considered oversharing if it's negative or if it's "too positive"? As in, if it's about a breakup and how your heart is broken and sad, or if it's about how you are going on another trip to Europe again- in order to gain popularity. Or the notion of the term "petty", where someone posts comments in spite of someone else for that person to witness as well as the rest of their followers.

Furthermore, there isn't enough research on teenage girls being the main culprits for this "oversharing" and "petty" business. Nor is there a lot of research on this topic with the social media platform Twitter. My objective for my research is to document and analyze what teenage girls' "tweet" on Twitter and how others view it as oversharing or being petty, whether its mentioned in a reply, favorite or even a retweet. Also, when other girls jump onto the bandwagon and agree with a tweet and feed into that same notion. What I want to discover during the course of my study are the different methods and lengths teenage girls go to "overshare" or be "petty" and how others feed in and respond to the tweets. We know why we just need to understand how and the lengths willing to go.

How I picture myself collecting data is through the method of content analysis. By consulting case studies, hashtags, articles, interviews, and following girls Twitter pages. What do they want to accomplish? How many favorites and retweets do they get for their tweets? What's the background information for them to feel the need to tweet such things?

Now that was the basis of my research proposal and I feel like I got my message across in a serious and professional manner. It took me three days to write this and I took my time to make sure I was taken seriously and that it would make sense to anyone who reads it.

I hope this intrigued you just as much as it did for me! And why I pursued this topic and question. When my paper is done, I'll update you on my findings!

But until then! Wait for my next post, thank you so much for reading!