I am reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, and one of his points is that much of invention happens either out of necessity or outside of structure vs traditional R&D / Academia.

I was wondering how much social media filling in all spare time keeps people from tinkering and inventing and making progress.

Though, I suspect the tinkers are still spending a lot of time tinkering - and only the people who have nothing better to do are spending most of their time on social media.