We all know that in the frenetic, always-on digital age, it's hard not to feel "out of it" a lot of the time.
It's not our fault - with infinite channels and infinite bandwidth, there's just too much pop culture out there to stay up on. Does society expect us to quit our jobs, abandon our families and barricade ourselves in a hotel room somewhere until we catch up on all those YouTube links, Facebook updates and Children's Hospital episodes?
Personal Finance App of the Week
Get more out of your smartphone with the latest apps to save money, get more organised and make life more fun.
[ More from Personal Finance ]
It's just not feasible. Jobs are hard to come by. Our families depend on us. Hotels charge outlandish rates for internet access.
Therefore, it seems there's a price to pay if you want to be a responsible, productive member of society, and it's having that same society mock you just because you think Taylor Swift is a character from a Mark Twain novel.
The app
Fortunately there's Clickables (free; iPhone, iPad), a smartphone app that serves as a cheat sheet for everything that's cool and hip. Not only can it shed light on all of your pop culture blind spots, but it can even hand you the torch so you can light the way for your friends and family.
The details
Clickables features the Web's best viral content (short videos, songs, movie trailers, retro television clips, etc) as culled by the editors at the entertainment website Vulture.com. All you have to do is browse the videos, read the quick descriptions and let the unique streaming awesomeness flow.
Titles include Watch a Small Child Learn Luke Skywalker's Parentage, Watch the Reunited Arrested Development Cast Do the Chicken Dance, Get a First Look at the Absolutely Fabulous Reunion and an infinite list of other entries that, depending on your level of pop-culture illiteracy, read like non sequiturs until you start to get in the groove.
It offers its own Editor's Picks and allows you to tag your own favourites so you can, naturally, relay them to all your friends via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter - thus turning you into the very thing that, just minutes before, you loathed beyond all loathing - a carrier for the "social-networking" virus.
Still, once you start using Clickables a few minutes every day, you'll get addicted to the power that comes from saying: "You haven't seen this? I can't believe you haven't seen this!"
Sometimes, the disease is the cure.
Have some great personal finance apps that you want to share? Write to Curt Brandao at cbrandao@thenational.ae
