In Billy Joel’s seminal hit We Didn’t Start The Fire the singer/songwriter chronologically lists the major events since his birth which have shaped the world today. In between Studebaker and North Korea he mentions “Television” without any clarification or context, but since television was invented in the thirties, and colour television wasn’t available until the sixties, what does he mean putting it here?
Possibly he means that television entered his life between Nixon and the Korean war, as it may have been when the Joel family finally got their first television set, or it could mean that television finally became the universal means of mass communication during this era, finally superseding radio as the medium through which most people received information about world as well as local events. Read more