Frame awareness...

Today's question jumble goes something like this: To what degree are 21st Century humans born with an innate sense of manufactured imagery? In particular, how much more cognizant are we of the nature and artifice of photography, as opposed to when it debuted over one hundred and seventy years ago? Do our brain now know to process a picture of a field of flowers differently from an actual field of flowers? What are our "default" levels of media vs. content consciousness? How blurry is a frame?

Really I'm asking all this because in a parallel universe, I'm acutely aware of how much televised news media takes advantage of our lingering blindness to its inherent technological and rhetorical biases. It's no secret that TV numbs us out to the brink of hypnotic suggestion and that people are taking advantage of that softness in our perceptual abilities. But what about the more static media? Are we as a species consciously factoring in the frame and all the imagemaker's choices yet? Or is aesthetic abandon something we were meant to hold on to?