I love sending postcards. It’s a great way of keeping in contact with family and friends while traveling foreign lands. Sometimes, the postcards are sent as a ‘look where I am’, other times as a ‘wish you were here’, but mostly they’re sent to share my travel antedotes, events, and experiences.

But a recent San Francisco Chronicle article is suggesting that sending travel postcards is almost a dying art.

Turns out that while those at home still check their mailboxes daily for glimpses of foreign lands, we travelers are too busy blogging, emailing, and photo-txting to find the time to sit and put pen to postcard.

As one executive of a West Coast Company that distributes postcards states in the SFC article, technology has changed the way we communite when traveling.

“It’s [too] easy to take a picture of yourself at the Golden Gate Bridge with your camera phone and email it to a friend. In five seconds, it’s done.”

Postcards take so much longer. First you have to find one and then work out what to write. Then there’s finding a stamp and a mailbox. And of course, there is no guarantee that the postcard will arrive home before you do or that it will arrive at all.

So what do you think?

Are postcards on the edge of extinction?

When was the last time you sent one?

Related posts:

1. Want to Create A Postcard Revivial?
2. Postcards, Art and The Future
3. Pilgrimage on the Prairie: What seeking the past teaches us about our present
4. Highlights of the Pacific Coast Highway: natural beauty and driving bliss

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Liz projects, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.