Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcokeris
I also posted it to spice up this forum with new topics. A forum that, with all my respect, seems to me to have slowly gone into hibernation in recent years. A fall asleep perhaps also due to the reason that most of the Indonesian collectors and scholars have left without being replaced by new ones
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The greatest of thanks from the bottom of my heart, Marco, for attempting to spice up the conversation in our sleepy little town.
As Alan has pointed out, much of the keris discussion has indeed moved to Facebook pages these days. I know this personally as i am also a moderator on not one, but two of these pages. The reasons for this migration are many.
On the language front, we are an English only forum, while FB pages allow their members to post in their native tongues. This is, of course, easier for Indonesian collectors, so they find these pages more accessible. Facebook has a built-in translation feature, though i must say that it does an awful job with Indonesian/Javanese languages. Unfortunately, our forum has no such bulit-in feature, so allowing folks to post in various languages is just not an option.
Secondly members of FB pages like the fact that there tends to be less, or less strictly regulated rules on these pages. For instance, even though the two pages i moderate do not allow selling, it is clear to me that many dealers use the pages just to display their wares and attract buyers. Of course, as a moderator i see a lot more of that than you and you may be surprised just how many on those posts never actually make it to the page. But clearly many of the posts that do are thinly veiled advertisements of keris for sale. That is obviously something we do not permit here and so we are not a friendly page for these particular members.
Thirdly, as Alan has suggested, these FB pages are far more social and less scholarly. That is not the fault of the Admins of these pages, who go to great lengths to have built up a couple of rather nice libraries of scholarly material in their "Files" sections. For me that is the best part of these FB pages, though i have a feeling only a very small percentage of members of those groups actually ever access any of these files.
Lastly, the levels of discussion on these pages rarely get beyond the cursory level. It is mostly just show and tell, often with the "tell" left off. I cannot even calculate the number of times i have asked members on these pages to elaborate on statements or support them with sources only to be met with either silence, or worse yet, indignation. Statements and claims are made regularly without any support and are simply expected to be accepted as fact without question. I am, of course, aware of certain members of good reputation that i know speak from a much deeper place of knowledge. But on a page that has more than 10,000 members it is just not possible to determine the veracity of claims that are not being backed up with anything further than "because i say so".
All this is to say that while i find these FB pages useful on many levels, i still come here when i hope to have engaging and thoughtful conversations that attempts to approach these discussions with some sense of scholarly review. And despite the possible use of different name handles, i do notice which members of the FB pages also feel the same and still post on this forum as well. You being one of them.
In the end, i am not sure there is really much that can be done to bring more collectors to our table if they are satisfied with the level of discussion they are finding in the more heavily trafficked FB pages. I do believe that it is the discerning collector who seeks as much knowledge a they can find that is wise enough to check out ALL the options for discussion they can find on the internet. It's really not too difficult to be open to all these different venues that are available as any of them are just a URL away and require just a stroke of the keyboard to arrive at.