Affluence without status: Classed meanings of working-class leisure activities on the Finnish-language Internet

Previous research suggests that working-class culture is underrepresented or stigmatised, particularly in commercial and digital media environments shaped by middle-class values. Using a two-phase research design, this study investigates how working-class lifestyles are represented in Finnish-language Internet discourse through the semantic associations of leisure activities. In the first phase, via nationally representative survey data, I identify leisure activities that are disproportionately characteristic of working-class occupational groups. In the second phase, a word-embedding model trained on a large dataset representing the Finnish-language Internet is used to examine how these activities align with class-related semantic dimensions. The results indicate that working-class leisure activities are positively associated with affluence, cultural cultivation, and moral legitimacy and negatively associated with social status, while only weakly associated with education, workplace position, and gender. These findings suggest that working-class culture remains institutionally marginalised despite connotations of legitimacy and affluence.