ABSTRACT
The age of digital media finds us living in a New Oz. Yelp tells us where to eat, Groupon saves us money, Foursquare finds our friends at the corner bar, and Facebook keeps our identities intact. And there is more: Smart phones help us download music, digital commons make people briskly convivial, and Wikipedia renders thinking easy. Everything digital, a digital everything, is ours for the taking: E-learning at cut-rate prices, shopping on a thousand websites, J-dates on your laptop, Web-MD at the ready. The road to the Emerald City is now paved in silicon chips, not gold, and the only witches one must worry about are those cozying up to Nintendo’s vampires. To be sure, the dangers of cyber-bullying, phishing attacks, and malware must be reckoned with, as must the more complex challenges of disintermediation, time-shifting, the design economy, and the transnational imaginary. Things have changed so profoundly that the qualities Dorothy and her three friends depended upon-love, courage, wisdom-are now antique.
