Networked Desire

As I sat in Geneva Foreign and Sports this morning waiting for the estimate on my car, I tried pulling a few things on networks and online marketing together to distract myself and pass the time. In emotional branding, Marc Gobe notes that "it is the emotional aspect of products and their distribution systems that will be the key difference between consumers' ultimate choice and the price that they will pay." But how do networks (on which the emotional aspects of products are sold, and of which the distribution systems themselves are made) utilize this emotional aspect?

Making this question even more enigmatic is the viewpoint of Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, summarized in a question they pose toward the start of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks: "Is there a 'nonhuman' or an 'unhuman' understanding of networks that would challenge us to rethink the theory and practice of networks?" Their goal is to "seek a means of comprehending networks as simultaneously material and immaterial, as simultaneously technical and political, as simultaneously misanthropic and all-too-human."

How do these contradictions become reconciled? What is it about online marketing and networks themselves that allows for an imposition of a human quality while still remaining entirely inhuman? Which do we notice more - the human or the inhuman? Why? And why do we respond in such an enthusiastic manner?

Questions, I suppose, that I will have to settle for myself over Thanksgiving. So much for relaxation.