HAMBURG (dpa) – An SMS (short message service) whizzes its way to its recipient, while the good old postcard takes its time getting there. But now the question: is a quick message tapped out using a cellphone really better just because it is faster?
Sales of picture postcards have been steadily declining over the years, while the enthusiasm for the SMS – with messages of up to 160 letters – has taken on euphoric proportions since the technology was first introduced in 1994.
For many technology fans, the evidence seems clear-cut: the message sent via telephone need only to do a little bit more – become longer, more colourful and with sound effects – and it will be the death sentence for the postcard.
“On vacation, I still write postcards,” admits computer scientist Thorsten Loeffeler, and he says why: “SMS doesn’t have a picture.”
This makes the scientist of the Fraunhofer Institut for Software and Systems Technology a traditionalist. Nowadays, many mailboxes which formerly the mailman would fill with colourful cards from the Austrian Alps or from Mallorca are now filled instead with bills and advertising leaflets.
The cellphone, by contrast, with its “ding-ding” sound announcing the reception of a message, is increasingly being used for a greeting such as: “Now sitting at a beachside cafe in Lago Bolsena. Weather and hotel are tops. Ciao, Anna & Scotty”.
If in 1996 the number of SMS messages sent in Germany were a few million, today the figure is 1.8 billion – each month. Loeffeler says the trend is now heading towards the private electronic message.
“If the technology of telephone messages makes further progress, then things might look grim for the postcard in ten years’ time,” he said. This will be the case provided that the mobile phone can be used to transmit digitalised vacation pictures and that the equipment is cheap enough that it will be used on a mass scale.
“Multimedia Messaging” (MMS) is the name of the future in communications when cellphones can transmit anything, be it a video, music, or the vacation snapshot. This would be the death sentence for personal letters and postcards, predicts Hubert Wald, chairman of the Net Mobile AG company in Duesseldorf.
Others aren’t so certain.
“The cellphone experts are mistaken,” defiantly says a kiosk lady in Hamburg. “We may be selling fewer postcards than in the past, but there will always be postcard fans.” She says a postcard has that “certain something”.
Looking at the history of the postcard, now going back more than 130 years, the kiosk lady is right. Scarcely was the postcard invented, it quickly became a collector’s object.
It was in 1865 that the Prussian secret postal service counselor Heinrich Stephan got the idea of augmenting regular letters with what he called a “Correspondenzkarte”, bearing no picture.
The Austro-Hungarian empire accepted the idea in 1869, followed the next year by the German states of Wuerttemberg, Baden, Bavaria and the North German Federation.
Lithographs and photos on one side of the card made the new simple messages a hit. Collectors, called “philocardists”, formed clubs and filled up photo albums with picture postcards.
“The golden age of the postcard was between 1895 and the end of World War One,” says anthropologist Karin Walter of the Museum for Communication in Hamburg. A card written in the morning often reached the addressee hours later – because back then, the mail was delivered up to four times a day.
“Today not nearly as many picture cards are sent as back then,” she said. “But also it is not nearly so few as many people think.”
In the year 1900, the then German Reichspost delivered 955 million cards. Today, in the age of the telephone and e-mail, Germans buy around 80 million picture postcards each year, according to Working Group of Manufacturers and Publishers of Cards (AVG). The German Post Office itself does not count how many cards it delivers.
“A postcard is something different than just a plain text on a display,” Karin Walter says, noting how picture postcards still decorate the walls of many peoples’ homes. Mothers hoard the postcards sent by their children.
And when the picture you took yourself shows your vacation spot under grey and rainy skies, don’t you also head for the kiosk to buy a postcard showing the place in a more favourable light?
“The postcard appearance, with its touched up hues of blue sky and without the masses of tourists has a firm place in our everyday culture,” Walter asserts.
AVG boss Guenter Garbrecht additionally reports that the joy people have with the new media has only a temporary impact on the pleasure people get from sending postcards.
“Today, people prefer to send postcards inside an envelope,” he said.
At the German Post Office, spokesman Christian Brockert is also optimistic about the old-fashioned methods. Despite the boom in e- mails and SMS greetings, the volume of mail being handled by the post office continues to rise.
