History of VCR, User Culture

On reading Greenberg's account on the history of the VCR, I was pleasantly surprised that the whole process closely resembled what I have seen with the rise of the Internet. First, the technology is here. Then come the handful of enthusiastic people who find out new ways of use which is mediated among them into a new user culture. These unexpected novelty pisses off the bigger corporations, and they in turn attempt to restrict the technology and its specific use patterns through what they are good at: law and money. But at the same time, they quickly go about finding new ways to make commercial profit of the new user culture. And before you notice it, the commercialized 'system' becomes the default.

I completely agree on Greenberg's point that this whole process cannot be explained without looking into the in-between spaces and players. It is rather an interaction between technology, corporates, regulatory systems, and the complicated mixture of actual users. This interaction is the clue that leads to the answers of why some technologies are selected while others are dismissed. Why did the Laserdisc, which was more compliant to the aspirations of the movie corporates (e.g. better resolution, no wear-out for multiple playbacks, cannot duplicate) miserably fail to replace the VCR? The 'recording' function that connected the users closer to the TV culture and content sharing. Then why did the same concept succeed after a decade with the DVD? Probably (though not the sole reason) because the user culture itself had changed in some ways, incorporating experiences from other media such as the CD and Video game consoles.

But it calls for a practical question. Can the user culture - which is a sort of dialectic result between the (company) proposed use and (user) desired use - be effectively analyzed or even predicted? Is it the crucial driving force itself or should it rather be regarded as a surprise/noise factor that bring about the unexpected in the course of the history of media technology? Maybe a modification of Lessig's content regulating modalities (law, market, norms, architecture) would be useful, where a specific technology is socially selected by laws, markets, norms and 'user-culture'.