Last Friday afternoon, rapper Schoolboy Q, a hard-rhyming affiliate of the Kendrick Lamar-led Top Dawg Entertainment crew, released the video for “Man of the Year,” his first single of 2014. The clip features the emcee gallivanting on a deserted island surrounded by his homies and a clique of comely and scantily clad women. At the same time as Q is celebrating with “titties, ass (and) hands in the air,” 2014 has seen social media and internet blogs blow up regarding Elle Magazine’s portrayal of actress Mindy Kaling on its cover. Given that folks are demanding new standards for women’s rights in progressive social circles, it’s amazing that this video clip, displaying classic and tired tropes of a male-dominated society, remains unscathed.

This isn’t a played referendum on rap video vixens or a rap on the knuckles of rap music however. Let’s accept that a culture that celebrates misogyny dominates pop culture. As well, let’s contemplate blaming a data-obsessed and (likely) misinformed age for society falling into an uncaring malaise where misogyny becomes acceptable. What does this apathy mean for the future of society overall, and can it be cured?

At present, between Jay Z dominating business and Kanye West popping wheelies on the zeitgeist, hip-hop is unquestionably the most omnipresent form of all popular culture. Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron — his third studio album — is expected to drop on February 25th, and as a member of the super-popular TDE, will likely be the most widely rising-to-mainstream rap album of the first-half of the year. In this new era, a star showcasing himself (to his broadest audience yet) with a bevy of those aforementioned “titties, asses and hands” leaves me no other option than to shake my head at rap, and moreover, shake my head at society in general. While some in society occupy things, demand changes, and start revolutions, even more of us regard something like this video as ineffectual and puerile instead of influential and powerful. The net gain from this is negative; less occurs and society needs to demand more. It doesn’t fit with where life on Earth is ideally headed. To have a leading pop rapper in 2014 featuring tight, slo-mo camera shots of women’s asses in a video while rapping about money and swag? Yes, it is ingrained in many men’s natures to be greedy capitalists who appreciate the female form. However, in order to ensure that society pushes ahead to achieve new ideals, not doing the stereotypical, obvious and expected in order to nurture a new (and possibly) better nature for humankind should be a necessary aim for all.

A point must be made that it’s almost impossible to alter the course of humankind when, worse than rap videos, the real issue at hand is that social media and the data (not information) that it presents governs our everyday lives. Here are a few facts to consider:

• According to social media management firm, Digital Royalty, 2.5 terabytes of data are created on social media on a daily basis. That number is impressive, but how that number grows when you consider print newspapers, books, periodicals, and streaming/downloadable/physical/broadcasted forms of entertainment, too.
• Data can be defined as “raw, unorganized facts that need to be processed,” whereas information is data that has been “processed, organized, structured or presented in a given context so as to make it useful.”
• With the human brain able to handle 60 bits of data per second, one can extrapolate that the human brain is equipped to ideally process five terabytes of data per day.
• With 2.5 terabytes of data created via social media alone, it’s possible that there’s certainly entirely too much data available (from Foursquare checkins to #blacktwitter hubbub to yes, even Mindy Kaling possibly being “fat-shamed,” for the brain to process being informed by the ill effects of Schoolboy Q’s misogynistic mainstream rap video.

As a data-obsessed society, we’re likely too tired and have no desire to get angry at rap because we’re just too overloaded with data (and not information) to think, then care, about Schoolboy Q’s antiquated desire to celebrate being “Man of the Year.” The easiest solution to the issue is to toss our laptops in the trash, eliminate texting, delete all social media apps from our phones, and go back to the days of campfire songs and letters delivered via Pony Express. That’s obviously not going to happen, so what do we do instead?

Maybe it’s time that we start thinking again. Instead of using our brain capacity to decipher the apparent deluge of data, maybe it’s time that we start turning that data into information. From there, the information can be used to create a new world order. In an era plagued by an overabundance of avenues available for communication, broadcasting and entertainment, it may be time to pause and consider what’s right, what’s wrong, and what we do as a society when we have gone too far and lack the ability to care.

“Bruh, I see, girls everywhere / Titties, ass, hands in the air, it’s a party over here / Shake it for the man of the year.” Yes, it’s a hellvua hook for a helluva song. However, as a society, let’s pause, consider that it exists, and realize that we know we absolutely must do better than this.