Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network by Lydia Pyne (

Description: Postcards by Lydia Pyne A history of the postcard, which created connections between people, places and beliefs. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher 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. Author Biography 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). Review "In this beautifully illustrated, breezily articulated book, Pyne introduces us to an analog antecedent to todays 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 humanitys 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" "Pynes 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 Long 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. Review Quote "In this beautifully illustrated, breezily articulated book, Pyne introduces us to an analog antecedent to todays 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 humanitys enduring desire for palpable connection." Excerpt from Book Postcards have been printed, sold, mailed, and received on a scale that makes them, historically, the largest class of artifacts that humankind has ever exchanged. There are a lot of different ways to dig into the history of postcards and any history will inevitably be incomplete. Although postcards were a mass medium, they were--and still are--a disposable one. This disposability means that there are holes in the historical record, making a complete archive of all the worlds postcards inherently impossible. Many histories of postcards opt to explore postcards through specific pictorial or geographic themes ("historic postcards of New York City") or printed types ("American holiday postcards.") These narrow, specific approaches tend to focus on postcards by a particular manufacturer, such as the iconic Curt Teich & Co. Americana postcards or the carefully lithographed portraits found on cards by London printer Raphael Tuck & Sons. Others opt to concentrate on specific postcard technologies, like Kodaks "real picture" postcards. As many types and styles as there are of postcards, there is an equal number of ways to talk about their histories. Throughout this project, Ive learned at first hand that postcards are personal and always have been. I didnt start out to write a book that drew so heavily from collections of family postcards or to highlight my own different postcard experiences. But, completely unexpectedly, the medium lent itself to this approach, as postcards require us to recognize that global social networks are built out of individual stories and connections. The more I dug into stories about postcards, the more I found myself and my family in them. For example, my own great-grandfather, Robert Boles, saved a shoebox full of hundreds of postcards that were sent to him between 1905 and 1920--what historians call the Golden Age of Postcards. His daughter, my grandmother, kept the cards for years and gave them to my mom, who has long been interested in family history from my dads side of the family. My mom bequeathed the postcards to me when I started the background research for Postcards, convinced that these family mementos would offer a way to humanize the global postcard phenomenon. She was right. To that end, reading postcards in various libraries and archives felt a bit as though I was reading messages in bottles; I didnt know the recipient or the sender, and the message on the back would have made sense only to them. To put it another way, it was like reading a strangers text messages and trying to figure out the backstory for any individual text. Drawing on postcards from my familys collection meant that I "knew" the people writing, receiving, or saving the postcards in a way that I couldnt with postcards from other institutional collections. It continued to make postcards personal. Postcards have left an indelible imprint on the history of human communication, unmatched by any other material medium. They owe their success to the decentralization of their manufacture as well as the physical material connection they created between sender and recipient. Postcards and their digital descendants continue to be about personal connections--specifically, short, cheap, ephemeral messages. There are inexorable echoes of postcards in contemporary digital picture networks such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and other photo-sharing apps. We recreate old social networks--old postcard social lines, if you will--with every post of a digital picture. Postcards are not yet completely extinct. Details ISBN1789144841 Author Lydia Pyne Short Title Postcards Publisher Reaktion Books Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 1789144841 ISBN-13 9781789144840 Format Hardcover Subtitle The Rise and Fall of the Worlds First Social Network Pages 232 Imprint Reaktion Books Place of Publication London Country of Publication United Kingdom Publication Date 2021-10-18 NZ Release Date 2021-10-18 UK Release Date 2021-10-18 Illustrations 110 illustrations, 80 in colour DEWEY 741.683 Audience General AU Release Date 2021-12-31 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:134365791;

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