Exploring Screen and Social Media Use Among Young Adults With Persistent Post-Concussion Symptoms
Abstract
This thesis details how young adults with ongoing post-concussion symptoms deal with the omnipresence of screens and social media in their daily lives. Their injuries often induce heightened sensitivities to stimuli, requiring them to commence “cognitive rest,” a treatment contested by experts in the field. While emerging literature endorses such rest during the acute phase of concussion recovery, numerous clinicians still recommend that patients reduce screen exposure (i.e., extend the rest) beyond this period until symptoms resolve. Complex dilemmas arise, however, for young adult screen users whose symptoms persist for weeks, months, and years.
Drawing upon Max van Manen’s phenomenology of practice, this thesis delineates these dilemmas. Its central inquiry concerns young adults’ post-injury screen and social media use as they (a) attend to their online identities and obligations (e.g., relational upkeep and schoolwork) and (b) obtain information on the Internet about current concussion management strategies to aid their recoveries. Addressing both (a) and (b), five female participants aged 18-25 shared their lived experiences through semi-structured interviews.
These participants experienced screens as simultaneously helpful and harmful, alleviating some of their challenges while aggravating others. They appreciated that screens afforded them social connectedness, distraction from difficulties, and accessible concussion information. Conversely, they confronted technology’s central role in their everyday routines, struggled to integrate their invisible injuries into their social media presences, and concluded that Internet information could supplement (but not supplant) traditional clinical encounters. Underlying their interrelated screen-use dilemmas was the realization that they could use screens as an escape but not fully escape screens.