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Abstract
This article examines nonhuman agency, or the capacity of nonhumans to carry out goal-directed action. The central argument is that agency should be conceptualized not as a binary (someone/something does or does not have agency) but rather as a spectrum, with degrees of agency. Based upon an empirical study of the design and use of frog dissection simulations (cyberfrogs) in high school biology classes, the author develops two parallel spectra of agency, bioagency and cyberagency, to describe the degrees of agency experienced by biological life forms and technologies. These spectra put agency into an evolutionary perspective, comparing how humans evolved agency over time to how technologies are now evolving agency. The article concludes with challenges for future research to further explore the validity and implications of a notion of cyberagency that evolves over time, can be represented on an analog spectrum, and is independent of human agency.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the National Science Foundation (SES-0217996) for funding this study, to all of the individuals and organizations who participated in this study, to David J. Hess, Ron Eglash, Nancy D. Campbell, and William A. Wallace for providing helpful feedback on portions of this manuscript, and to Bo Xie for her constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.