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(2015) The Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television, Dordrecht, Springer.
Androids — robots that look like humans — serve as central characters in movies and television all the way back to the origins of those forms. In movies, they primarily have two values: they are mostly symbols of technological threat — the dangers of industrialism, in earlier movies, and the dangers of human ingenuity and automated slave labour in later ones — or they are, less often, symbols of how we contemplate the meaning of "human", the issues connected with "personhood". Androids depicted in television shows have a more varied symbolic value, mainly because the writers have the time and need to develop various plotlines. So, in a television series, the signification of the android can vary depending upon the episode we view.
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Full citation:
LaGrandeur, K. (2015)., Androids and the posthuman in television and film, in M. Hauskeller, T. D. Philbeck & C. D. Carbonell (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 111-119.
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