The iPhone at the Deathbed | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone at the Deathbed

nytimes.com

19 pointsbookofjoe19 comments

Weird, I had just discovered the subreddit /r/lastimages before checking HN and this article shows up. It's a morbidly fascinating view into people's very personal relationships with now-deceased friends and family. Made possible by the ubiquity of cameras today.

I'd just like to point out that there is a gratuitous swipe at a prominent politician in this piece. Of course it is wholly out of place, and should have been edited out in a piece of true journalism.

Regardless of your political leanings, it is astonishing to see how much time and energy is dispatched each day trying to push an opinion on an unwilling audience. One day soon, this will be known as the golden age of media propaganada.

If "gratuitous swipe" is your term for accurate description, sure.

It was a direct quote from a source.

Yes, true.

But it was unnecessary for the story-- it added nothing. I'm sure the author had many more quotes from many of the subjects, yet not all were chosen to print.

Selecting quotes for a nonpolitical story based on political considerations would be terribly agenda-driven journalism.

But that's why the quote was included. Who are you arguing with?

Newspapers do this sort of thing all the time. If some source used the phrase "latest Obama atrocity" the NY Times would never use that phrase--unless they framed it in a way to destroy the person making the quote. I don't get upset about this. It's just how journalism is.

I don't think that's true, although I unfortunately don't have any good ideas for how to prove it.

When I first read the headline, I thought the article was about how the iPhone itself was dying.

I'm surprised to see the NY Times have such clickbait-ish headlines. Mods, maybe change the title on HN?

Yeah that title is a complete lie, the article has absolutely nothing to do with iphones.

It’s also a dumb article. People are taking pictures of their dead loved ones and posting it to Facebook. This is... news?

It's not news, in the sense that it is some kind of timely breaking event. It is, however, an interesting change in the way people perceive death as a concept, which makes it newsworthy.

I will concede that the title should be changed for HN's guidelines.

I’ve seen candid photos of people at their death bed, but it was usually done by people who were professional photographers, and often part of a photo feature essay. The phenomenon of regular people having a high quality camera at every moment in their lives, and a network to immediately disseminate such photos without a gatekeeper, is most certainly a relatively new phenomenon.

Just the other week I saw someone who had posted a candid photo of him and his dying girlfriend at the hospital on Reddit. He was ridiculed and the thread was deleted, but not before someone had screenshotted it and posted it on Twitter to mock. Seeing death in public is still an uncommon thing.

Victorian death photography was a thing. Before cameras were cheap, people used to get photos taken of their dead loved ones because it was literally the only photo they would ever have of that person and they wanted to cherish the memory.

Often these photos would be taken as a group family picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_photography

> Post-mortem photography was very common in the nineteenth century when "death occurred in the home and was quite an ordinary part of life."[3] As photography was a new medium, it is plausible that "many daguerreotype post-mortem portraits, especially those of infants and young children, were probably the only photographs ever made of the sitters. The long exposure time made deceased subjects easy to photograph.'

> In the Victorian era it was not uncommon to photograph deceased young children or newborns in the arms of their mother. The inclusion of the mother, it has been argued, encourages one to see through the mother's eyes

Also requires an account to read the article. No thanks, I'll just move on.

https://archive.is/U2BTg

> I'm surprised to see the NY Times have such clickbait-ish headlines.

It stopped being a prestigious broadsheet long ago. The active anti-Trump coverage (and I'm anti-Trump) is just cannibalizing their remaining credibility, which is derived from the interesting investigative work they still do from time to time.

How on earth do you think they should be covering him?

The Times is committed to a larger arc about Trump [1], meaning each story reported is colored by a per-determined narrative [2]. While I may agree with them that Trump is a boob, this approach is intellectually dishonest and lacks the journalistic integrity that the paper was built on.

I'm not an editor, so I'm not going to give you a bullshit internet opinion of how they should do their job. I will say that media organizations such as the LA Times and BBC seem much better at reporting the information as it is, and letting me form my own conclusions.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/reader-center/impeachment...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/business/media/trump-news...

The story is about exactly what I thought from the headline. It’s wrong to attribute your misinterpretation to malice.

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