Finding Jimmy Ma is never really a challenge.
Between his time on AOL Instant Messenger and a cell phone that rarely leaves his side, Jimmy's friends and parents can pretty much find him any time of the day.
"If I'm going out, I have to have my cell phone," said Jimmy, 17. "My friends will call me, and most of the time my mom, too."
Like many other teenagers, Jimmy's life revolves around technology, and it's not just instant messaging and the cell phone. Jimmy spends time playing games on his PlayStation2, and it seems as if his at-home DSL connection works its hardest when he downloads music from the Web. None of it seems strange to him, maybe because his friends are all chatting online and carrying cell phones, too.
But his parents are sometimes surprised by how much technology dominates his life.
"Sometimes my parents think it's a waste of time," Ma said. "I'm just drawn to it. I can do so much on the Internet: research for a project, play games and talk to my friends."
A recent survey by the San Jose Mercury News and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 84 percent of all children with access to the Internet are logging on at least once a week, with 15 percent of them spending 10 hours or more per week on the Internet. More than 80 percent of them say they use the Internet to play games or exchange e-mail. More than 60 percent of them are sending instant messages and downloading music.
"I'm on the Internet a lot," Jimmy said. "I talk to friends, buy stuff online and check my bank balances. At night, I'm up until early in the morning talking to my friends on AIM."
But is there too much tech in the lives of teens?
Vicky Rideout, spokeswoman for the Kaiser Family Foundation, said the survey offered insight into how teens use technology compared to the other things they do during their day.
"A really interesting thing we learned from the survey was that kids don't seemed to be obsessed with technology," she said. "They're balanced and surprisingly well-rounded."
Mike Simpson, a 16-year-old Gilroy High School student, says that technology is all around us - and has been for generations.
"If you think about it, your alarm clock, your watch, all of that is technology," he said. " Where would we be without a little technology?"
One of Simpson's favorite places on the Web is neopets.com, an online world where people create and care for electronic pets. A neopet, like a real pet, needs constant attention from its owner. It needs to be fed and walked - in an electronic kind of way - otherwise it becomes weaker and eventually withers away.
Caring for his neopet forces him to log on to the Internet regularly. But his obsession with the site isn't really anything to be concerned about. In fact, being tech savvy is probably a good thing for teenagers.
Rideout said parents who responded to the survey said they want their kids to know how to get around the computer and the Web.
"Virtually all the parents think it will be important to their educations and, to a lesser degree, their career paths," she said.