I love soap operas, and my Instagram algorithm has caught on. Lately, the app has introduced me to the world of micro-dramas, which is how I found myself deep inside the catalogue of Shots, Tata Play Binge’s mobile-first micro-drama category. The stories are soapier, the airbrushing thicker, and the pacing induces a kind of attention whiplash.

Take the classic meet-cute between a brooding billionaire and a wide-eyed domestic worker. It races forward as a sprint, engineered for a vertical, POV-style aspect ratio. She trips; he catches her in a 9:16 frame so tight they are practically sharing oxygen. They lock eyes in slow motion for three seconds. In a 60-second episode, three seconds is an extravagant allocation of time. The moment swells under royalty-free EDM strings. But there is no room to linger. By the forty-second mark, the billionaire thrusts a 50-page “marriage contract” into her hands. The episode ends with a flash-forward to her walking down the aisle.

These shows do not so much build scenes as detonate bursts of plot. Transitions shimmer with digital sparks, turning titles like Rent a Boyfriend and Shotgun Shaadi into high-definition, 60-second jolts of pure overstimulation. Watching them feels unlike engaging with any other storytelling medium. In micro-dramas, the plot is injected directly into the brain. That may be the point.

In a media economy governed by platforms, attention is the central currency. Micro-dramas represent the logical extreme of this paradigm. Though they originated in China, micro-drama apps have proliferated worldwide. Apps like ReelShort, DramaBox, and ReelSaga boast millions of daily users accessing shows in multiple languages featuring regional actors. In India alone, nearly 50 million users engage with these apps, valuing the market at $260 million annually.

Unlike typical short-form content, micro-dramas are designed to run continuously across hundreds of episodes. As they are built for rapid mobile viewing, they compress the sprawl of television storytelling into vertical frames. Not only does this lean on exaggerated emotional beats; it also bends the very spatial logic of visual media to fit the feed. Given their popularity, the inevitable questions follow: do micro-dramas merit serious criticism? Are they even art?

In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag argues that taste operates as a cultural sorting mechanism, elevating certain forms while dismissing others as excessive or unserious. What we label “bad” art often reveals more about dominant beliefs than about the object itself. Micro-dramas, with their hyper-expressive close-ups, unapologetic melodrama, and velocity, clash with cinema’s inherited grammar, long tied to horizontal scale, extended duration, and visual expansiveness. To reject micro-dramas outright may therefore defend older hierarchies of attention rather than offer an objective assessment of quality. Camp, Sontag writes, “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement… It doesn’t reverse things… What it does is to offer for art and for life a different – or supplementary – set of standards.” Under this framework, micro-dramas may appear aesthetically thin when measured against cinema’s traditional markers of restraint, but their exaggeration and speed can also be read as a distinct form built around intensity and a brazen awareness of their own stylization.

Early cinema, in fact, resembled today’s micro-dramas. Films were short, often under ten minutes, relied on exaggerated performance, and were built for quick turnover in a commercial entertainment circuit, not as objects of reverent artistic consumption. French slapstick comedies like Max Takes a Bath, roughly seven minutes long, entertained audiences with condensed, expressive physical action typical of early silent film. The absence of synchronized sound forced filmmakers to rely on spectacle and visual clarity to communicate affective meaning, strategies that anticipated later storytelling conventions and helped define cinematic language itself. What is now canonized as the birth of cinema was, in fact, popular entertainment constrained by technology and economic realities.

But Sontag also reminds us that mass sensibilities guide the evolution of form. Micro-dramas are perhaps best understood as products of a platform economy that rewards immediacy over ambiguity. It is easy to explain their rapid rise by invoking shrinking attention spans or declining taste. That is only half the story. The “shrinking attention” thesis assumes audiences passively prefer speed and excess, unaware of their own atrophy. It overlooks how immediacy has emerged as a deliberate style under late capitalism. As Anna Kornbluh argues in Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, we have begun consuming art the way we consume products: instantaneously. Just as a modern factory seeks zero lag between order and delivery, micro-dramas function as cultural delivery systems, minimizing the lag between pressing play and emotional payoff. The viewer is not impatient by nature. They are simply participating in platform logic that demands art run as seamlessly as a digital transaction. Who is to say this is a failure of their cognitive capacity?

In other words, art has always evolved with the economic and political currents of its time, but we have repeatedly asserted agency in steering that evolution, both despite and because of them. One study shows that when people feel a loss of control over their environment, they turn to small, immediate “wins” or intense emotional experiences to reclaim a sense of agency. Nielsen data supports this, showing that viewing behavior is shifting toward “comfort” formats as a form of cognitive offloading. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer further documents a global decline in institutional trust, suggesting that we may now gravitate toward “simplified value systems” like games, which, as C. Thi Nguyen notes in Games: Agency as Art, offer a clear, legible sense of success and justice that real-world institutions no longer provide.

It’s plausible to see micro-dramas as gamifying traditional storytelling. They lean on delayed gratification, sticky hooks, and melodramatic cliffhangers, all spun from familiar, easy-to-digest tropes that trigger primal brain impulses. To a skeptical audience, this overt, self-conscious artificiality can even feel more honest than the manufactured grit of prestige TV.

There is also the fact that micro-dramas are quickly turning into the only form of visual media that can slip into the fractured routines of the modern worker. As Jonathan Crary observes in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, there are “very few significant interludes of human existence… that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time, or marketing time.” This is a loss of “temporal sovereignty,” a diminishing capacity to regulate our own rhythms, as sociologist Judy Wajcman describes. The situation is especially stark for platform and freelance workers. As the International Labour Organization documents, algorithmic management compels workers to remain perpetually online, dissolving the boundary between work and rest. The temporal cracks that remain are perfectly suited to micro-dramas, designed for a precariat reliant on technology but without the means for intentional leisure.

While these structural conditions suggest the medium could be a paradigm shift – and a new frontier for art – algorithmic surveillance precludes that possibility. It turns the world of micro-dramas into the apotheosis of the culture industry, where every aspect of the narrative is carefully fine-tuned to maximize viewer engagement. The platforms creating these micro-dramas track which characters hold attention, which scenes are replayed, and which moments make viewers drop off. Some even use AI-assisted tools to test multiple narrative variants and determine which combinations maximize engagement. In this way, plots are honed through feedback loops that reward what keeps people watching, continuously optimized for virality. As Shoshana Zuboff writes, “surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.”

The audience unwittingly shares in this authorship through collective viewing patterns. Since their in-app reactions, which are extracted as data points, guide narrative decisions, they become something of invisible showrunners – but it’s hard to tell whether those trends are bottom-up (from organic cultural movements) or top-down (from algorithmic interference). Either way, the result is storytelling that feels hyper-responsive and detached from human creativity as its primary source of meaning. The viewer is neither audience nor author but a site of input that keeps the machine churning.

Such heightened, compressed engagement, manufactured for algorithmic profit, can easily tip into exploitation. The rush of instant catharsis – jumping from zero to peak emotion in seconds – creates what Hartmut Rosa calls a “frenetic standstill,” where we consume more but feel less. As the algorithm moves faster than we can reflect, it has ushered in an emotional regime that prizes rapid, high-intensity hits over the slow, cumulative catharsis that comes with experiencing a story. As a result, the viewer trades the slow build of complex feeling for a string of high-frequency spikes.

What kind of art becomes possible when time is scarce and emotion measurable? Earlier populist forms eventually expanded visual culture for audiences. Can micro-dramas do the same, or will they remain tethered to the feed? We may lose the scale of the silver screen, the slow-burning longing, and the impact of the long-form arc. In exchange, we get art that moves as fast as our anxiety. Whether this marks the birth of a new cinematic language or is merely the high-definition debris of our attention spans remains to be seen.

So would I dive into a micro-drama the way I do a K-drama? No. It’s not even that it’s unrealistic or unbelievable. Any run-of-the-mill soap opera asks me to suspend disbelief. But the pleasure of a melodrama is that it makes me work toward catharsis, something I can reach only if I stay in the story’s world long enough to form an attachment. Without that stretch of familiarity, the thrill of a resolution all but disappears.