Video calls have been with us for a while. Except, they were rarely used. IME, people sometimes had Skype calls with relatives abroad and that's about it. And then, COVID happened. Suddenly, Zoom skyrocketed, with Google Meet not far behind. The reason is obvious.
Now, the time of lockdowns and restrictions on gatherings is over, the incentives to do video calls are (AFAICT) more or less the same as pre-COVID, and yet video calls persist. They became a completely routine way of doing business meetings, academic seminars and occasional social events. Why? AFAICT it's just the initial adoption barrier: once everyone did lots of video calls, and realized they are actually pretty convenient, they just kept using them.
So, here's a fun question: What other things are like video calls in the pre-COVID era? That is, the technology exists (more or less: maybe the UX needs some trivial improvements), the use-cases exist, only nobody uses it just because they're unaware or because it's not a "normal" thing everyone does. Given something to create initial adoption (like COVID did for video calls), everyone would start using it and never go back.
These are good points. Regarding lectures, insofar as Zoom was a risky gamble that worked out better than expected, I still think an appeal to social norms is appropriate. In a world full of meetings, lectures and conferences, why wasn’t there enough experimentation to figure out that Zoom was an acceptable 80% solution rather than an unacceptable 50% solution without COVID to force the issue?
Your point about tech is a reasonable explanation, although it would turn the OP on its head. If Zoom was maturing as a technology right when COVID hit, then it might not have been “stuck” on early adoption, just made to appear that way by coincidence. We remember the sudden surge of demand, but forget that only a year or two before, video conferencing was much worse. Maybe we’d still have seen Zoomification of lectures and meetings even if there had never been COVID as Zoom’s technology matured in 2019.
This would fit with my fundamental perception that it’s extremely rare for a potentially world-changing technology to be stuck long term on early adoption due exclusively to social norms. Usually there’s a collection of issues: high costs, governance problems, moral qualms, technological shortcomings, a small market, and so on.