E. Writer Except, if the medium was a letter, then that becomes both the message and the messenger. It shows how information can present itself in various forms, which also shapes how we perceive and even understand the message. This takes it back to The Absence of Reality, how we never have a true sense of reality, and cannot know it because we are constantly shaping reality through human or artificial constructs. Biology also limits what we can see and know about reality. His book was before social media. In Absence, I went back to the 1980s, starting with Baudrillard, then the 90s to Frank Tipler, then to 2003 to Bostrom, then back to S. James Gates.

One quote from the book, that's longer, has somewhat of a similar message:
"We live in a time when reality is no longer shaped by objective
facts, but rapidly shifting streams of narratives and
information circulated to human consciousness through
various modes of media. It is critical to understand that these
constructs are merely illusions.

We exist in a manufactured reality of manmade crises."

Roy Scarbrough And what your post shows is that there is a fragility to aphorism. They're delicate, and break when pushed.

In Through the Vanishing Point, McLuhan discusses how painters' use of lineal perspective to create an illusion of space. He argues the device created an uncomfortable sense that reality is a thing that's manufactured.

I'll push back on the "uncomfortable" the texts of the time show that the reaction was a delightful sense of wonder.

E. Writer That's an excellent example of how a device can create a sense that reality is being manufactured. Baudrillard said as much in Simulacra and Simulation. And using perspectives in painting does create an illusion that a 2D space is in fact, a 4D space, showing distance and depth when that is in fact, not the case. This is an example of reality being manufactured. Had I known McLuhan, I may have explored and analyzed his views for my book.

Roy Scarbrough The physical device associated with this was the camera oscura. Literally "dark room". A small dark enclosure with a pin hole will project the exterior scene on a flat panel from which one can trace the perspectival lines to demonstrate how the illusion of space is constructed. Filipo Brunelleschi famously set one of these up in the Piazza del Duomo in florence.

E. Writer Oh yeah, I've seem the camera obscura in Neil DeGrasse Tysons show, The Cosmos. He showed the history of it, starting back in the Middle East and China and they demonstrated how it worked. Interestingly, the eye works very similar to the camera obscure and modern photo cameras, which are modeled very similarly to how the eye perceives light.
I wrote about this in Reality Unbound. What I was trying to do in the book is draw a parallel between how technology mimics human biology to demonstrate that one does not require a biological substrate f have a form of consciousness. The camera is just one example of that. Here's what I wrote on page 40 in the book:

"In his infamous book, Leviathan, 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that only material matter is real. He believed that thoughts consisted of images generated by biological chemicals in our bodies. I suppose, much the way that images are generated on a computer through the use of electrical signals and other complex functions. Computers did not exist at that time, of course, but the description used by Hobbes is very much in line with this concept. How cameras capture images and store them on film is also similar to how the eye captures images and transmits them to the brain. Humans have often created different types of technology that mimic human features. "

SJ Blues Oh no, I am so sorry.