Stagefront are, first and foremost the forms and the quality of writing, which stretch from stenography and the fragment, but also to become hypertexts mixed with images and sounds, or even collective creations, the children of many authors working together. The writer Alessandro Mari announces a feuilleton published directly on the net and open to suggestions from readers. As the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has observed, the presumed decline of the book format – as we have known it since the times of Gutenberg – is accompanied by an explosion of writing, a largely unexpected phenomenon. Everything is recorded and deposited in immense archives, and remains available, nailing writers to their responsibility, even many years later. Memory becomes an eternal present.

The role of publishers, the cultural mediators par excellence, that seems to be threatened by self-publishing initiatives, has instead re-established itself as indispensable against an undiffererentiated offer, where clients would not be able to find their way by themselves. In the meantime, literary reviews, which have almost disappeared in print, re-arise on the net, drawing readers into fiery discussions; and blogs become the new sites of informal criticism, a world away from academic specialisation.

What will be the fate of printed newspapers, which amongst other things also provide the networks with most of their information? And what will be role "mobile phone journalism" in information in the future, the valuable flying witness reports of people in the place of an important event? How is journalism itself changing and how will it change in the future?

We wonder how the form of reading will change and if a zapping model will also emerge. In the meantime, Feltrinelli has announced that it is putting on sale passages of famous literary texts at the symbolic price of 0.99 euro, as happens for single pieces of music in mp3 format.

No less important is the fall-out on learning, education, work and research, where the advantages of greater involvement of students is however accompanied by serious structural difficulties, from teacher training to the cost of instruments and the poverty of wi-fi networks in our country.

Increasingly visible are the phenomena that accompany the exponential growth of the social networks and social media. The networks unceasingly create broad communities whose components interact closely and constantly, giving life to new forms of association, of extremely fluid groups that move outside institutions and often against them, improvising virtual arenas where spontaneous movements find space for expression. Twitter itself has become a tool of politics based on the speed of communication, but exposes those who use it to the risks of falsehoods and pranks.

The very dimensions of the social media give an idea of the changes in progress. It has been calculated that subscribers to Facebook represent a virtual community which by population is between the 5th and 6th nation of the world .

Among the predictions of those who announce the disappearance of printed works and the apocalyptic laments of those who fear the decline of known civilisations, the scenarios forecast are rich in unknown elements and concerns.

Against those who claim that the net has launched an irreversible real, bottom-up democracy, opponents maintain that the net is in reality a false democracy, inhabited by a culturally and psychologically population, and as such easy to manipulate. The ease of aggregation, evident in the revolts of the so-called "Arab spring", seems to be accompanied by a poverty of political contents.

The arrival of the cloud brings together in a virtual sphere all the information free of a physical nature – the end of privacy and the Big Brother lord of marketing and able to make immense profits under names like Google, Amazon, iTunes, global monopolists with a capacity to direct not only consumption but also behaviour, taste, mentality, and life styles and standards.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, digital illiteracy has an impact on the access to rights. New levels are established in the rights to citizenship according to the ability to use the web. This is a problem destined to assume vast proportions in our country, where only 30% of the population is able to decipher a written text.

And there is still more: literary works in a digital format are exposed, as music has already been, to the very real risks of piracy and illegal duplication. The large virtual bookshops are developing very aggressive commercial policies that worsen the difficulties of independent bookshops.

These are some of the aspects of an extremely fluid situation, but also of extraordinary interest and astonishing potential, on which the 2012 Fair wants to reflect.