Knight Rider: Data Mining

Maybe it was the success of The Matrix, or maybe it was the age of the Internet that did it, but in the last 10 years, it's no longer flying cars or fast-talking robots that symbolize the world of the future. No, these days it's the ability to almost touch piles of data that has become the sine qua non of quality futuristic imaginings. Case in point, Minority Report. The high point of that film (for me, anyway) had to be when Tom Cruise dons his info gloves and commences a magnificent danse du data, shuffling through the visions of the precogs accompanied by the strains of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Down here in small screen land, Knight Rider's writers make data manipulation a staple of the show. In Episode 2 we saw mechanic/scientist/romantic lead Sarah Graiman yoink an image off her laptop and display it on the lab's giant monitor. ...