Postcards Are Disappearing

While looking through an old book in one of my bookcases the other day I found a treasure of sort. It's a postcard from the 1930's sent while on vacation in Bavaria, Germany by a relative to my grandparents.  The graphics were quite nice and the time frame, prior to W.W. II and at the beginning of Hitler's stint as leader of the new Nazi Germany, makes it interesting to me. The text this aunt wrote in the small space on the back of the postcard was the usual sort note about how lovely the place was, and how "you" should see Bavaria etc. I wonder if, when she mailed that postcard, she had any idea how awful Germany would quickly become under Hitler.

It made me realize the days of the postcard are numbered, another victim of our faster and less personalized electronic communications. I wish I would have saved more of the old postcards I once had. I remember one my dad sent when me when he and my mother drove across country to visit relatives in California. It was about a remote spot in Texas that he and my mother passed through, and what he wrote  (It's a personal family joke so no need to recount what you wouldn't understand) suited the postcard format so well- short, to the point and funny.

The first postcards were sent in the mid 1800's in Europe and North America. Allegedly, Austria became the first nation to permit the mailing of  them. They were an instant hit in an age when people took so much time to write detailed letters to so many they knew and loved. Outside of speaking directly to a person, the letter was the main way to communicate in an age that offered few other alternatives. Postcards became the lazy way to do what a letter had always done. I guess the postcard was to the letter then what an e mail is to a letter today. Just as it is easier to send an email today than a letter, as it was easier in 1900 to send a postcard than a letter.

I know that postcards are now an outdated format. Surveys show that only about 5% of people who travel still send them. Most of those are people who accidentally find amusing or eccentric cards while on travel, and who send them simply because they are cute or unique. Given the time and cost that it takes to send and receive them, postcards are dated quickly. Most of us today prefer or send an instantaneous real time communication and photo. Sigh... sterile technology is winning again.  I hate that!  But I bet we who have received both postcards and today's instant electronic communications remember the cards more often and find them more meaningful than those tweets, e mails, phone pictures etc.. After all, it takes more time, costs much more and requires far greater effort to use postcards

Given the fact that all snail mail is a dying format, one need not be a genius to know that the obscure postcard snail mail will be an early casualty and precede the letter in the snail mail graveyard. But still, there is time for nostalgia. Next time you travel send someone a postcard. They will find it a refreshing break from the electronic communications that are so ordinary and mundane.