Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network

Description

Although postcards are usually associated with cheeky seaside tableaus and banal holiday pleasantries, they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections - connections between people, places and beliefs. This book examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art and culture. It shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct.

Lydia Pyne is an affiliate researcher at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her previous books include Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Can Teach Us About Real Stuff (2019).

"In this beautifully illustrated, breezily articulated book, Pyne introduces us to an analog antecedent to today's tweets, texts, and memes: the postcard. Condensed within this compact carrier of pithy messages, Pyne demonstrates, are histories of the postal service, printing technologies, and portraiture of the quotidian-as well as humanity's enduring desire for palpable connection." -- Shannon Mattern, professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, and author of "Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media" "Pyne's Postcards expertly tells the story of how this small piece of mail went from saving the US Post Office to being the foundations of our image-based social media platforms. This must-read book is a deeply researched chronicle of how we keep in touch, simultaneously invoking a rich sense of nostalgia while giving readers a meaningful framework for our contemporary moment." -- Jason Farman