Jon Agar

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Title

Biography

Jon Agar is a British historian of science and technology, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. He was previously at the University of Manchester's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and served as a curator at the Science Museum, London. He edits and contributes widely on the history of computing, government, and twentieth-century science.

Constant Touch

Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (Icon Books, 2003; revised editions 2013 and 2017) is the standard short history of the device.

Agar's method is to treat the mobile phone as an object with a political and industrial history rather than as an inevitability. He traces the technology from wartime and police radio through the cellular concept developed at Bell Labs in the 1940s and 1970s, the divergent standards politics of AMPS, NMT, TACS and GSM, and the specific national conditions — Nordic state cooperation, Japanese carrier control, American spectrum auctions, European regulatory harmonisation — that produced very different phones and very different phone cultures.

The book's most useful contribution to anthropology is its insistence that the phone's social meanings were not predicted by anyone who built it. Text messaging is the standing example: SMS was included in GSM as a minor engineering afterthought for network signalling, given no marketing and expected to be used by almost nobody, and became the dominant use of the device. Agar's account of this is the clearest available demonstration that the significant uses of a technology are discovered by its users rather than designed into it.

The Government Machine

The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (MIT Press, 2003) argues that the computer's history cannot be told as a story about calculation. Agar's subject is the British civil service, and his claim is that the mechanisation of government began long before electronics — with the registry, the filing system, the index, the punched card, and above all the clerk. The Victorian bureaucracy was already an information-processing machine, and the computer was adopted because it fitted an existing organisational form, not because it created a new one.

The book's central image is the reciprocal relationship between machine and bureaucracy: the civil service was described as a machine long before it contained any, and the computer was subsequently understood on the model of the office. This is a substantial corrective to histories that begin at Bletchley Park or the ENIAC.

Key Ideas

• Technologies have national biographies. The same device developed under different regulatory and industrial conditions becomes a different object with different uses.
• The unpredicted use. Agar repeatedly documents cases where the socially decisive application of a technology was one its makers dismissed.
• Information work precedes information technology. Bureaucracies were processing information at scale for a century before machines were available to help.
• Mobility as the organising change. His account of the phone's significance rests not on connection but on the detachment of communication from place — the point at which a number stops addressing a building and starts addressing a person.

Selected Works

• The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (2003)
• Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (2003; rev. 2013, 2017)
• Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2012)
• Science Policy under Thatcher (2019)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Agar supplies the industrial and political history that anthropological accounts of the mobile phone usually assume. Where Perpetual Contact asks what the phone did to social life, Agar asks how this particular phone came to exist and why it took the form it did — and shows that the answer involves spectrum policy and standards committees at least as much as it involves human need.

Related Reading

• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• Mobile technologies
• Landline Telephone
• Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement