Informatization Promots Marxist Philosophy's Abundance And Development

Informatization succeeds the agricultural modernization and industrialization and has upgraded the development of human society. In the informatized society, every field in human life is correlative to the acquisition, management, transferation and distribution of information. Thus, before giving a theoretical discussion of the philosophical questions aroused by informatization, we need to settle the definition of information, that is, the philosophical essence of information. What is information? Is it material or spiritual? This becomes the new theme of the Marxist philosophy in the age of information, and the most direct challenge that informatization poses to the research of ontology. By observing the dialectic relationship between information and matter and that between information and consciousness, the philosophical essence that information is a common attribute of all will be illustrated in the essay, so that the philosophic connotation of the attribute of matter can be enriched.Informatization is closely related to epistemology whose latest object of research is just the information itself. Therefore, the scientific explanation of the essence of information is regarded as an important theme of epistemology at the age of information. With the development and application of information technology, all the practices of human society have manifested new features of informatization. Accordingly, the methods of cognition tend to be informatized: The subject of cognition has accelerated from the single subject of human to the complex one of"human-machine-net"; and as for the object of cognition, the virtual object processed by computer and Internet is an addition to the mere practical one. Moreover, the elements of information have been supplemented to the intermediary of cognition. These changes in the methods of cognition are contemporary connotations the information age bestows on human's activity of cognition. Thus a profusion of materials is supplied to the development of epistemology of Marxism. The theory of productive force is the theoretical basis of the historical materialism of Marxism. As well as Marxism, it is a scientific system that keeps pace with the times. With the information economy developing and the society being further informatized, the significance of information and information technology in present social production is getting obvious. Information and information technology have even already been involved in the research of present productive force, as the elements of constructing it. More importantly, a new form, different from the material productive force and spiritual productive force, has come into being. To put forward the information productive force and take theoretical research on it has turned to be a necessity in the age of information when the theory of productive force of Marxism has richly developed.The development of informatization not only provides the rich materials for the expansion of the outlook on matter, epistemology and the theory of the productive force, but also puts forward the new research on the examination of the effect of the information development from the perspective of the Marxist philosophy. It has an instructive meaning for realizing the sustainable development of informatization.