Meet Shingy, AOL's Self-Proclaimed ‘Digital Prophet’ Who Has The Internet Buzzing
The Internet went bananas earlier this evening, as people began spreading a picture from an interview that was on MSNBC featuring a man with quirky-looking hair. … The man is David Shing, and here's everything you need to know about him:
Context & Ripple Effects
David Shing has been AOL's self-described Digital Prophet since the Tim Armstrong era began in 2009, when the ex-Googler took over and rebuilt the company around content brands. On February 8, 2014, a screenshot from one of his MSNBC interviews went viral, with Valleywag, UPROXX, The Wire and a cluster of Twitter users amplifying his look and pronouncements.
The timing matters for AOL: the buzz arrives weeks after a frenetic January in which the company bought personalization startup Gravity for $90 million, handed its Patch local news network to Hale Global, and sold Winamp and Shoutcast to Radionomy while taking a 12% stake in the buyer — and after reported talks to buy Business Insider collapsed over price. Overnight, the conversation around AOL shifted from its deal-making to the aesthetics of its most visible public face.
First-order effects
- Shing becomes the internet's shorthand for AOL's brand identity within hours, meaning every future appearance he makes will be pre-framed by this mockery cycle rather than judged on its own terms.
Second-order effects
- Attention now attaches to how AOL spends on image-making rather than its portfolio surgery: a company mid-restructuring around Gravity, Patch and Radionomy finds its marketing apparatus — the prophet role among it — subject to the same scrutiny as its deals.
Third-order effects
- If stylized corporate futurists keep becoming viral punching bags, companies may retreat from theatrical 'prophet' or 'evangelist' titles toward executives whose credibility rests on shipped products rather than stagecraft — a shift in how tech firms buy thought leadership.
The trend: Corporate tech futurism as a branding device is colliding with a social web that rewards ridiculing it faster than any PR operation can control the frame.