The Postcard

Contemporary Tourist Behaviors and Digital Cultural Practices

Abstract

The classic approaches to the illustrated postcard, initially nostalgic or of strict historical research that have been made in recent decades, reveal that we are facing a complex phenomenon of social communication with images in contemporary society, in which, after having emerged the postal object as a commercial and open communication product within a process of international normalization in the second revolution industrial. Its fusion with the development of photomechanical techniques at the beginning of mass society made it a system of interpersonal communication, linked to the encyclopedic tradition of images and collecting and associated with the experience of travel in the beginnings of elite tourism, in addition to becoming one of the first pre-digital social networks.
The text analyzes the development of the illustrated postcard, some of its antecedents such as the "carte de visite", a photographic product that was born without the vocation of circulating through postal networks, the rise of postage in mass society and the changes that occurred in its format and contents in the rise of the first mass tourism in Spain in the years of Franco's developmentalism. and the new cultural practices that have emerged around the experience of travel with digital social networks and telecommunications that have transformed modes of communication and are relegating printed postcards to the immediacy of electronic messaging applications
The analysis focuses on the cultural and social changes that have taken place and defends the idea that we are not facing a decline of the postcard, but a new crossroads of cultural transformation, in the same way that is also happening in other areas due to the emergence of the so-called network society.