Not everything needs an academic explanation. A Google search on why do people buy picture postcards, admittedly a very general ballpark figure sort of "let's see what comes up" search, gets lots and lots of hits, with at least the first of these being more or less on topic. Most of the pages that come up seem to be written by postcard collectors who bemoan the fact that these are no longer being sent, but at least one of them was well worth the search. Are postcards obsolete? by Mark Jenkins in the Washington Post from February 2015 even gives us some statistics. He reports that:
The U.S. Postal Service processed 770 million stamped postcards in fiscal 2014, down from 1.2 billion in 2010, according to figures provided by agency spokesperson Sue Brennan.Jenkins reports that in a 2013 interview then president of the U.S. Souvenir Wholesale Distributors Matthew Tobin noted that the printed postcard business was "probably half of what it used to be". That's of course for sales in general, whether for sending or for collecting. I'm not really interested in how many postcards get sent. What concerns me is whether people purchase postcards instead of (okay, in addition to) taking photographs by themselves. One of the comments to the article does deal with that question. The commenter writes:
I've always bought postcards because the pictures are much better than any I could take, and they're often from angles, viewpoints, etc. not easily accessible to tourists (town of tower, helicopter, boat, etc.). Especially when they were 15c (even now still as little as 25c), they're much cheaper than photos, and you have them to show around or put in a scrapbook as soon as you get home.Almost inadvertently, however, this comment raises the question of whether people still keep scrapbooks. We might purchase picture postcards to send to someone, but when we do that, they get to decide whether or not to save them. If we buy them for ourselves, saving them becomes a problem that we have to deal with.