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shanaqui's review
informative
medium-paced
4.0
I hadn't realised that the author of this book was one whose books I'd enjoyed before, especially Genuine Fakes, so that was a nice surprise. I'll write a more thorough review for Postcrossing's blog in the future, and try to focus in a bit more on the points made, but broadly speaking I found this really enjoyable, and put a bunch of sticky markers in to help me come back to things I was interested in.
One thing I did notice is that Pyne often uses quotations from other popular books, rather than scholarly sources; there is a bibliography with some relevant and important stuff in it, but it's worth knowing that there's a lot of reference to other non-scholarly works -- I think mostly for their opinions rather than anything else, but still worth keeping in mind.
Pyne does seem to think that postcards are dead, and that people sending them are mostly engaging in a sort of nostalgic afterlife. I'd say instead that postcards have changed: with instantaneous communication via text message and email, and phone calls being generally cheap, you don't need to send someone a postcard to say you arrived safely, or to bear your advance invitation to a dance when you're in town. Now they're much more intentional, when people do send them, and often to do with collecting.
I don't know where I'd place Postcrossing in all that, but I'd say that it's the truest sign that the "first social network" hasn't fallen at all; if anything, Postcrossing's random connections and ability to bring strangers together make it more like modern social networks.
One thing I did notice is that Pyne often uses quotations from other popular books, rather than scholarly sources; there is a bibliography with some relevant and important stuff in it, but it's worth knowing that there's a lot of reference to other non-scholarly works -- I think mostly for their opinions rather than anything else, but still worth keeping in mind.
Pyne does seem to think that postcards are dead, and that people sending them are mostly engaging in a sort of nostalgic afterlife. I'd say instead that postcards have changed: with instantaneous communication via text message and email, and phone calls being generally cheap, you don't need to send someone a postcard to say you arrived safely, or to bear your advance invitation to a dance when you're in town. Now they're much more intentional, when people do send them, and often to do with collecting.
I don't know where I'd place Postcrossing in all that, but I'd say that it's the truest sign that the "first social network" hasn't fallen at all; if anything, Postcrossing's random connections and ability to bring strangers together make it more like modern social networks.
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