Story highlights Photographer Lorenzo Maccotta spent a week at a digital detox in China

The young people at the boot camp are subjected to "discipline and repetition"

(CNN) On his first day at a Chinese treatment camp for young people addicted to the Internet, Lorenzo Maccotta lived liked everyone else there: awake at 5 a.m., physical training in the morning, lunch, rest, more training, ethics lessons, war movies, dinner and bed.

Only once he'd been through a quick version of the digital detox did Maccotta lift his camera.

The 33-year-old photographer spent about a week at one of the hundreds of the military-style boot camps where young Chinese people are quarantined from their compulsive use of technology, mostly online gaming. Even as an outsider, it was difficult to protect his vision and keep his distance from the rigors of the program.

"The main challenge was to keep my mind away from the repetition imposed by the school," he said. "It was not easy to find the distance to set a point of view."

Photographer Lorenzo Maccotta

The internees, as he called them, were boys and girls, men and women. They were as young as 8 and as old as 30. Most had been forced to enter the treatment center -- sometimes kicking and screaming -- by family members concerned about their physical and mental health.

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