Over the span of a decade, the spectrum of online activities has expanded worldwide. From casual browsing to social networking, from education to entertainment, and from engaging in commercial to philanthropic pursuits, the array of online activities has continued to diversify in scope. Some types of online activities such as e-education, e-work, and e-entertainment gained traction during the pandemic. Set in this context, this paper analyzes geographic patterns and socioeconomic influences on purposeful internet use by American internet users during the COVID-19 pandemic. Purposeful internet use comprises online activities that range from social networking, teleworking, and accessing online education, entertainment, and financial services. The conceptual model of purposeful internet use for U.S. states is comprised of sixteen independent variables that are posited to be associated with sixteen dependent indicators of purposeful internet use. The independent variables are partitioned into seven categories - demographic, educational attainment, economic and occupation, infrastructure, affordability, social capital, and societal openness. The dependent indicators of purposeful internet use are split into four categories - communication, entertainment, work and education, and finance or commerce.K-means clusters show that the lowest levels of online activities take place in states that often had higher proportion of urban population and higher median age. Ordinary Least Squares regressions reveal that proportion of remote workers is positively associated with online activities, showing the pandemic’s influence on purposeful internet use, a novel yet intuitive finding. Remote work is followed in importance by median age, urbanization, and educational attainment. Interestingly, urban population is found to be inversely associated with online activities. Implications of these findings for the digital divide in the U.S. are discussed and policy recommendations are outlined
