LONG STORY SHORT

Welcome to the era of micro-dramas, designed for a distracted, dopamine-hungry generation

- BY POOJA BIRAIA

On a lazy Sunday evening, you open Instagram. You are expecting dance reels and pet videos, but something else catches your eye—a teary girl in a cab. “I never thought he’d betray me,” she says. The driver glances in the mirror, tense. A phone rings. And then, the screen goes black. ‘Episode 2 tomorrow,’ it says. You just watched a drama. In 47 seconds.

Welcome to the era of quick and punchy micro-dramas, a storytelling format designed for the distracted, dopamine-hungry generation. These short dramas are typically up to five minutes long and are flooding platforms like Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Moj, Josh, and Amazon miniTV, captivating millions as they seek a quick ‘rush’ while waiting in traffic, chilling during lunch break or binge-scrolling between classes or meetings. Although this format isn’t new—with platforms like Snapchat experimenting with short-form storytelling years ago—it has come into its own in the last couple of years, say experts.

The reasons are many. One, attention spans are shrinking. In a podcast with The American Psychology Association, Dr Gloria Mark, a psychologist and the chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine, says that back in 2004, her team found the average attention span on any screen to be two-and-a-half minutes, but through the years it became shorter. “So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds. And then in the last five or six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds,” she says.