“My head, for example, my head:  what a strange cavern that opens onto the external world with two windows.  Two openings—I am sure of it, because I see the in the mirror, and also because I can close one or the other separately.  And Yet, there is really only one opening—since what I see facing me is only one continuous landscape, without partition or gap”  --Foucault

The first fifty or so pages of sensorium deals with outlining various senses, which seem (to me) to be rather similar to that of umwelt, or the way that we perceive things.  Much of the text seems to be concerned with unpacking why we perceive the primacy of our senses in a certain way.  Over and over, notions of modernity are brought to bear on explaining why or why not ocular or olfactory senses are or are not more valued.

This book takes off from another age where prosthetics and technology was perhaps a bit spookier, into the current age where they are generally quite accepted.  Sherry Turkle, in her section of the text speaks of Stanford Cyborg experiments where several people wore computer equipment that allowed them to compute all of the time.  These “cyborgs” as they came to be called endured painful chafing and gouging due to the cumbersome nature of the computer equipment they wore.  By most accounts, at the time when this was done it was quite a strange thing to do. 

But, it seems at the present, society is more willing to engage in a digital media.  In a time where people are becoming more acceptable of virtual spaces/places, using computer-mediated technology is not out of the norm.  In fact, many theorists argue that our dependence on cell phones makes us cyborgs of sort.

I often walk by groups of 20 or more people of mixed gender often of a similar socio-economic group all of whom (ostensibly) attend the same university, waiting for the bus waiting to come to campus.  Generally, most of the time even, these individuals are using a personal handheld computing device.  In this way, they are mediating communication with a large number of others, while completely (or so it seems) ignoring those people around them. 

From a social lens this seems to be quite strange.  But, in a way these individuals are using media to exist and to sense (or perceive) things.  Granted, it is interested that they choose to do this using (typically) technology with minimal richness of cues, but they are doing it nonetheless.  However, most of the communication that is taking place on these portable devices ( I hypothesize) is probably text based (which is to say visual) and not auditory.  Though these devices were originally designed t be telephones (which has a decent amount of communicative richness) now the devices are more personalizable, but people favor the less rich forms of communication such as text messaging, emailing and facebooking.

Which again turns us back around to the notion that the visual is the dominant sense (in this paradigm) and that others are often ignored in order to give primacy to the sense of sight.