Information Society Concepts: Philosophical and Anthropological Analysis

The article is devoted to the analysis of the information society problem in the context of the philosophical and anthropological approach. The purpose of the study is to carry out a philosophical and anthropological reflection on the phenomenon of the human being of the information age through the prism of the system of concepts of the information society. The use of the anthropological principle as the basic principle for understanding the human phenomenon meets the challenges of the digital age. Human perspectives in the digitalized world are an important research task that will help answer the question of what an anthropological subject is in the twenty-first century and whether it remains exclusively anthropological. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that economocentric concepts are clearly conceptually insufficient. In addition, the vast majority of concepts of the information society are neo-enlightenment: the increasing role of information in socio-political and economic life is perceived as a positive factor that contributes to the improvement of relevant social subsystems, the realization of the principle of justice, since information is an inexhaustible resource. However, the “dark side” of the information society is somewhat less emphasized, where the use of information technologies becomes a tool for committing crimes. An important feature of the information society is the transformation of traditional social structures towards networked ones. On the one hand, this trend is positive, as it helps to reduce the level of social tension, due to the fact that a person of the information age is actually socialized in a variety of microsocial network communities. At the same time, it contributes to the formation of a “split personality”, a kind of “network schizophrenia”, when a person loses the integrity of his or her self-image, as he or she is constantly making a kind of multi-self-presentation. The human being of the information age is an extremely complex and contradictory phenomenon, the philosophical and anthropological reflection of which requires recourse to the conceptual apparatus of the information society theories. Human perspectives in the digitalized world are an important research task that will help answer the question of what the anthropological subject is in the twenty-first century and whether it remains exclusively anthropological.