::postcards::presentation::

“Once upon a time, major service providers around the world introduced a short message service allowing people to send multiple messages to each other for a nominal fixed fee. Typically the message space was small, and as a result people invented methods to deal with this by cramming in as much information as possible using shorthand, acronyms and restricted grammar. It became very popular, creating upgrades to services infrastructure, and employing additional people, all despite the fact that people were already using the same service provider to communicate with each other using similar services. Sounds familiar?” Rob Hellstrom, 2006

We’re talking about postcards. Yup, postcards. Think about all the ways we communicate: talking, listening, text messaging, instant messaging, emailing, writing and reading letters, watching television and movies, sending and receiving postcards?

Why postcards? Why do we communicate this way? In a digitized world, why do we keep using such an out-dated method of communication?

The idea of the postcard came to me in class on Tuesday. Our classmate Adam is about to embark on a great adventure (living in France for a quarter, lucky duck!). I asked him to send me a postcard, because I collect them. Of course I don’t collect them and keep them in a book in a drawer; I’m no entomologist. I don’t collect dead butterflies, shoving needles through their bodies and pinning them down, encasing them in glass for all eternity.

Nope, I collect postcards. I hang them up in my kitchen. Sometimes I take them down and read them. Sometimes, I even frame them. Having lived abroad, I absolutely adore getting postcards from my friends’ home countries or places they’re currently visiting. I love the pictures, the little notes, the funny dorky postcards, the panoramically breathtaking city view postcards ... I love them all.

This got me thinking about my impending presentation. Travel writing is a lonely profession (so says Robert Kaplan, whom I’ve mentioned before in class). I could stand up here and talk to you about how digital communication has drastically changed the world of travel journalism over the years. Truthfully speaking, however, everything would be old news to you. There are no computer programs that teach you how to travel better, how to write better, nor much less how to live better, and these are the three things that I feel sum up travel writing: writing, traveling and above all, living.

So I decided to share with you my silly little obsession with postcards. Hopefully I can connect the dots, so to speak, with how we change our world with technology, even though we may be using old habits to do so.

First, let me give you a quick history of the postcard.

The postcard was a major innovation of John P Charleton who patented the first private postcard in 1861 in Philadelphia, USA, and after 10 years it had been introduced in a number of countries around the world.

By the early 1900's postcards were enjoying a golden age of popularity. Around this time, the camera had been invented, mass picture printing had improved and all of this saw the introduction of picture postcards which only added to the popularity of postcards. Cameras became cheap enough to allow people to begin manufacturing their own picture postcards.

So ... why were postcards so popular? Here are a few reasons.

∑ Coverage (i.e. submission & delivery areas) was the same as normal mail;
∑ Postcards cost only half the price of a letter. This put written communication within reach of a greater number of people, including younger demographics;
∑ Being prepaid, it offered a convenient transactional engagement model to support greater penetration of the market;
∑ Postcards offered a choice of styles, pictures, and templates. Suddenly communicating was fun, compared to the formalized and stilted method of letter writing;
∑ Postcards were particularly popular with less literate classes because they were cheaper, there was neither room nor need for the complexity of a letter which had a strong social etiquette, a formalized structure and was generally difficult to compose. So the language became less formal and highly abbreviated to fit onto the smaller space. Spelling and punctuation were not essential in the hasty notes.
∑ Picture postcards became cheap and convenient souvenirs.
∑ Color picture postcards offered appeal in a time when most images were black and white, and they became highly popular to collect and swap.

All of these reasons for the success of the postcards can be applied to current technologies like text messaging or emailing.

“Instant Messages have been to email what postcards were to handwritten letters, The global mobile phone network created an opportunity to write a short message or more lately, to send a picture from a tiny device which sits in the pocket. Pricing differences meant that it was cheaper to send a message than to call someone.” (Hellstrom again)

A quick web search of “postcards” turns up some great websites. Today, postcard collecting is huge and my measly collection is almost embarrassing compared to some that are out there. Recently I discovered this amazing website which I think you all should try: www.postcrossing.com. The premise is simple: you send a postcard, and someone sends one to you. If you never send any, you never get any.

To me, this simple system epitomizes what technology does for us in the loosest sense: it brings people together in new and exciting ways. The postcard has been around for over a century now. In the internet age, we use it differently. Now we use it not as a necessary means of communication, but as a means of connecting on a human level with others.

Throughout the quarter, I’ve had my share difficulties trying to connect travel journalism with communication technologies. As a creative field, the best writing is done, at its simplest, with a pencil and paper. Having a laptop in the middle of the ocean isn’t going to come in handy if you can’t plug it in anywhere. Travel writing is about people, it is about places, and it is about what happens to you in those places with those people.

Our world seems to grow increasingly smaller every day. To me, the smaller the world gets, the bigger it feels. For example, my older brother lives in Hong Kong. Compared to fifty, even twenty years ago, it’s so much easier to go to Hong Kong for a few weeks these days than ever before. However, my brother has lived in one of the most amazing cities in the world for almost two years and I’ve yet to visit him.

As my friend James Bennett put it, “I think the greatest change is in the provision of vastly greater capacity at a low cost, meaning that more places benefit from travel dollars, although apparently this is the peak of the cycle. As fuel becomes more expensive, availability of travel capacity will diminish greatly over the next 50 years. I’m glad to be at the peak.”

As I said before, travel writing is about three things: writing, traveling and living. It’s about people and it’s about places and it’s definitely about good writing. The prolific travel writer Tim Cahill had this to say about his job: “I am living out my adolescent dream of travel and adventure. I do not mean this as a pejorative: adolescence is when we are the most idealistic, the most open to the new and the novel. I try to keep that almost childlike attitude; consequently, I am seldom as cynical as I might otherwise be. I think this is a good thing.” I agree.

Let’s finish where we began, with the postcard. What will happen to the postcard as technology changes at a quicker pace these days? Writer Rod Eime wrote this in his article The World In A Postcard: “What about the postcard? Will it be relegated to museums, libraries and art galleries as a 20th century curiosity? Or will it rebound as people rediscover the simple pleasure of handcrafted communication via the letterbox? Only time will tell.”

Let’s hope we can hold on to the postcard.

Resources:

Comment: Was SMS invented in 1861? By Rob Hellstrom
http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=1955

www.postcrossing.com

The World In A Postcard by Rod Eime
http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Erodeime/postcards/