Sony, if you haven’t heard, will soon be launching a Minisode Network on MySpace that will show three-to-five minute versions of old TV standards like Charlie’s Angels and T.J. Hooker.

Another sign of our ADD culture? Maybe. The Web certainly privileges quicker/faster/cheaper videos that only demand a blipvert’s worth of your time. Most web shows, like say Eisner’s Prom Queen, go by so quickly you barely have time to register that you’ve actually watched something. But because we’ve evolved along with TV, that’s more than enough.

Is this a good thing? Ask Steven Johnson, who argued in his book “Everything Bad is Good for You” that plotlines have grown more sophisticated over time and we, as the audience, have trained ourselves to keep up with ever-growing social networks in TV shows like The Sopranos and Lost. In fact, Johnson wrote his book before the Lost experience began moving beyond TV and onto the web. Not only do we keep up with the show’s elaborate networks, we keep up (and manage) that network on the web, too.

So what’s that have to do with minisodes? Everything. Each episode of Prom Queen — not technically a minisode, but humor me — uses a visual shorthand that you only understand because you have years of experience with editing tropes. No dialogues, just monologues. Instead of prolonged scenes, quick scene changes. You can follow the action because you understand the conventions of televised drama.

Another example: The SNL short “Dear Sister,” which relied on the audience’s familiarity with TV drama gimmicks — in this case, the use of song to convey overwrought emotion — to make its point (and to make you laugh).

So our ability to retain and parse narrative threads waaaaaay exceeds the demands of Charlie’s Angels. A three- to five-minute version is all we need.

Of course, you could make the same argument for most of the primetime crap on TV these days, too. Do you need an hour to figure out what’s going to happen in CSI: Miami? I mean really. Even the title of the show is an acronym.