Science Quote by Paul D. Boyer

Geography and media aren’t just backdrops here; they’re the machinery that decides what feels real. Boyer’s line has the cool precision of someone describing an experimental condition: remove proximity and remove television, and you don’t merely lose information, you lose urgency. “Remote” isn’t a neutral adjective. It’s a diagnosis of emotional distance, a hint that concern is often less a moral choice than a product of infrastructure.

The specific intent is to explain a mindset that now sounds almost alien: a life where global crises didn’t arrive as a nightly ritual, narrated with footage that collapses thousands of miles into a living room. Boyer is mapping how isolation produces a kind of accidental innocence. Not ignorance in the willful sense, but a low-resolution relationship to catastrophe. Without images, soundbites, and repetition, “world happenings” stay abstract - the sort of thing you might read about, briefly, and then return to weather and work.

The subtext carries a quiet critique of modern immediacy. Television doesn’t just inform; it trains empathy by making suffering legible and familiar, while also standardizing what counts as “important.” Boyer’s phrasing suggests that attention is engineered: place and platform determine whether events register as personal, political, or background noise.

Context matters: coming from a 20th-century scientist, it reads like a reflection on the conditions that shape public consciousness across eras. It’s also a reminder that our hyperconnected present isn’t automatically more enlightened - just less able to claim distance.