Very slightly interactive news

StarshipT_001

One of the most unusual conceits of the movie is “Would you like to know more?” These consist of short video news sequences with overlaid graphics and narration. At the top of the screen the user can click one of three categories for different categories of video feed, and two functions. At the end of each video sequence the “user” is prompted to interact—should they want to learn more—by clicking the legend at the bottom of the screen.

StarshipT_002

The user here is ambiguous. It might be that the audience member is the user, but of course it’s not interactive. There’s probably room here for some other writer to investigate the narrative tactic/semiotics of using an interactive interface in a passive story.

At the top of the screen are menu headers labeled “FEDERAL,” “GALAXY,” “TOP NEWS," "ENLIST," and "EXIT." For the usability purist, the collection is problematic for a number of reasons.

  • The information categories aren’t parallel, and there’s no clear reason why they shouldn’t be. What’s the relationship between Galaxy and Federal?
  • The functions (enlist and exit) are not visually distinguished from content categories.
  • The current state of the interface is a mystery. Am I currently watching Top News or something else?
  • Why does the interface chrome persist? Aren’t they distractions from the content? Maybe they should appear just only for the few seconds it’s inviting the user to interact, and fade at other times.
  • While a fascist government would be happy to try and trick its users into clicking enlist, I can’t imagine what benefit they get from having them accidentally clicking exit to close the propaganda engine. These should not just be visually distinguished, but given different visual weight. They’d probably want enlist large and exit smaller, if there at all.

“Welp. All the links in Federal, Galaxy, and Top News are purple. I wonder what’s happening in ENLIST news? Oh hey, who’s that pounding on the door?”

StarshipT_005

The presence of the "EXIT" control implies that this is an application running in an operating system or media computer space. This opt-in news application with its small windows of time for interaction helps to paint a picture of a highly engaged and ready-to-respond audience, fitting for the mid-war society portrayed in the movie.

Only once do we see an unidentified and unseen "user" control a cursor to view more. In this sequence, he or she clicks on “more” after watching a clip on the bug homeworld Klendathu. (It’s worth noting/condemning that the clickable word “more” looks identical to the rest of the non-clickable text, offering no special affordance.) In response to the selection, the application shows a live video news feed from the conflict on Klendathu. Was it just good fortune that a live feed happened to be available at this moment? More likely the application and media coordination system are smart enough to know a live feed was coming up, and played the trailer in advance as an advertisement for the content, implying a well-coordinated propaganda/content management system.

5E-opedia: In-depth topic

WPmode2

Leeloo learns about the facts of the human race which she is destined to save through an online encyclopedia available to her in many places: in Cornelius’’ home, the spaceship to Fhloston Paradise, and aboard Zorg’’s ship. Three modes are seen for it. Today we discuss the second mode, which is to select an in-depth topic.

In-Depth Topic

Leeloo can understand each item in the topic lists as they fly past. If she sees a topic that interests her in particular, she can press a button to find out more about that topic in more detail. (We don’t see the button, we just hear it.) Given that she’s looking at a screen of at most 66 and at least 4 options, and we don’t see a selection indicator, it’s anyone’s guess as to how she does this. Later we’ll see that she has a QWERTY keyboard to search for a particular word, and we don’t see that same search interface here, so it’s something other than that.

Once she indicates that she’s interested in martial arts, the entry fills the screen. The screen is a mix of a paragraph of text, images zooming around, and subtopics writ in large red majuscule letters scrolling past: KRAV CONTACT, SUMO, WRESTLING, SAVATE, KUNG FU, JU JITSU, NINJITSU, WRANG DO, FULL CONTACT… A still image of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon appears. This style of still-image and animated-text continues to play in a watch-and-learn way until it’s done, and then returns to the topic list.

TheFifthElement-Waco-siege

Here, as before, I am examining things unmeant for examination. Still, I have a job to do. In the diegesis of the film, the text flies by too quick for anyone but a perfect Mondoshawan to read. But here in the real world, I hit pause. There I learned that the paragraph of text in the background has nothing to do with martial arts. We only see snippets, but they read as follows. (Please post your short sci-fi stories that can make sense of these lines in exactly this same order.)

: a hindu thus
talks to hi[s] troops about taking
d takes on a persona of its own.
monster, if it wants to live, have
loved. We then get a news flash
cult (think Waco siege coverage)

This little bit of text reads much more like a script than an encyclopedia entry. Like it was a bit of text just lying around on someone’s computer. In any case it would not help Leeloo learn Jeet Kun Do in the slightest.

On the right side of the screen (see above) we also see a vertical green rectangle. At the top is the number 5, bookended with arrows. Below that is a graph, a set of thumbnail images (whose captions are too small to read) are linked by right-angle connecting lines, like what you might see in a tech-tree for a real-time strategy video game.

TheFifthElement-greenmenu

When the display shifts to showing the subtopics, this green area changes. The 5 changes to a dot, and a grid of circular icons appears, each with a green rectangle to its right. The left column of icons is hard to decipher, but the right column of icons looks like control buttons one might expect: More detail, next in sequence, prior in sequence, zoom out, zoom all the way out, fast forward. Missing are common controls for video such as pause and play. A the bottom is a button labeled “EDIT”. This control panel is not seen in use.

It’s still about the learning, stupid

That stuff on the left is pointless. Of course that bit from a script is goofy. The animated stuff might be interesting for getting someone kind of excited about the topic, or maybe to remember how awesome martial arts (that they already knew about) are, but for learning any of it from a computer screen, she would have been better off spending time on youtube. Even the subtopics make no sense. Sure, they’re all martial arts, but what’s the order? Not alphabetical. Not age. Savate (18th century) is between wrestling and Sumo, both far more ancient. It’s not even a list of the same scope of thing. Aren’t Krav and Full Contact different translations for the same thing? Anyway, learning the vocabulary of a domain is only a rudimentary first step to actually learning it, much less performing it. Good thing she’s “perfect.”

The first green area on the right does actually seem useful for learning. It’s an abstract representation of how some things fit together. There’s a relationship implied between parts. It may also provide a map to a bigger picture in which this particular topic fits. That’s actually pretty useful and even Wikipedia adopts it for entries that fit into larger domains of knowledge. So, OK, we’ll cut it some slack there.

The second green area, even though I’m doing a lot of inference there from icons, also seems like it might be pretty useful. It’s too bad we don’t get to see it in action.

Better for Leeloo’s purposes of learning a topic—even if you did it blazingly fast—would be to provide her a definition, a bit about the history, and then some blazingly fast how-tos of modern practice augmented with the principles at work in each of the examples.