Were postcards the world's first global social media?

They were certainly once as popular as social media is today.

- By Lydia Pyne, author of Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Social Network (Reaktion, 2021)

Historians estimate that in the first two decades of the 20th century alone, something like 200 billion postcards were in global circulation. Postcards are among the largest set of objects ever made and circulated by humankind.

There are a lot of ways to define the first postcard, but the idea that people would like to send a small rectangle of cardstock with a few lines written on it through the mail can be traced to Austria in 1869. These first postcards – called