When the status of elite culture changed and the barriers between elite and popular culture became increasingly porous, the dominant cultural paradigm happened to be modernism. Aesthetic and intellectual principles of modernism then filtered "down" into popular culture and were adopted by jazz and rock musicians, filmmakers, designers, and most recently digital media producers. A dialogue between elite modernism and popular culture had been going on throughout the twentieth century, but it became more productive in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time, when modernism was being superseded in the art community itself, a kind of "popular modernism" began to thrive in the larger media culture. Chapter 2 explores popular modernism through a series of examples from music, film, and digital media.