Automating Volunteered Geographic Information Systems in So- Cial Media: Theorizing Vgi as Geodemographic Surveillance ! !

! This paper considers Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), in particular the application of geotagging in social media photographs, as an emerging form of geodemographic consumer surveillance. Although the geoweb is typically framed within a context of participatory engagement with geospatial data by non-expert cartographers (Goodchild 2007; Elwood 2008), scholars have articulated the need to consider the political economy of the geoweb (Leszczynski 2012), as well as a critical discussion of the rhetoric of voluntary information and participation (Tulloch 2008; Elwood 2008). Outside of GIS, scholars have likewise theorized the changing infrastructural configuration of new media interactivity through automated surveillance and social sorting (Andrejevic 2005; Beer 2010; Graham and Wood 2003). This paper seeks to provide a theoretical contribution to VGI contextualizing it within a larger shift in social media infrastructure. It specifically traces the development of Facebook's use of geotagging as it relates to the production of geospatial data through mobile phone photography, particularly as new technical affor-dances allow for the automated geotagging of GPS data in photographic metadata. It argues that VGI practices embedded within private social media sites are encouraging the automated collection geospatial knowledge in order to realize geodemographic information, thereby inferring knowledge of consumer lifestyles and tastes (Burrows and Gane 2006; Phillips and Curry 2003).