This article draws upon interviews with work-at-home (WAH) agents who did technical support for DirecTV between 2009 and 2016. Satellite television technical support workers comprise an important node in maintaining the flow of television content as it is distributed by corporations, like DirecTV, through complex and often fragile technological conditions. Using interviews, trade press, and online employee forums, I outline the history of DirecTV’s WAH call center work and employment conditions, and its dissolution after the merger with AT&T. This research intervenes to demonstrate the ways in which WAH television technical support work is an ambivalent form of distributive media labor, at once feminine and immaterial, while also creative and essential for television distribution. This article also demonstrates how technical support work is influenced by current precarious and digitally converged working conditions, surveillance tactics, and media conglomerate mergers and structures.
Banet-WeiserSarah. 2015. “Keynote Address: Media, Markets, Gender: Economies of Visibility in a Neoliberal Moment.” The Communication Review18 (1): 53–70.
4.
BanksMiranda. 2009. “Gender below-the-line: Defining Feminist Production.” In Production Studies:Cultural Studies of Media Industries, edited by MayerVickiBanksMirandaCaldwellJohn, 87–98. New York: Routledge.
BulutErgin. 2015. “Glamor above, Precarity below: Immaterial Labor in the Video Game Industry.” Critical Studies in Media Communication32 (3): 193–207.
CurtinMichaelHoltJenniferSansonKevin. (Eds). 2014. Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
10.
DandekerChristopher. 2007. “Surveillance: Basic Concepts and Dimensions.” In The Surveillance Studies Reader, edited by HierSean P.GreenbergJosh, 39–51. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
11.
FoucaultMichel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
12.
FoucaultMichel. 1978. The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.
HavensTimothy. 2002. “‘It’s Still a White World out There’: The Interplay of Culture and Economics in International Television Trade.” Critical Studies in Media Communication19 (4): 377–98.
19.
HavensTimothy. 2013. Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe. New York: New York University Press.
20.
HillErin. 2016. Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
21.
HochschildArlie Russell. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
22.
LazzaratoMaurizio. 1996. “Immaterial Labor.” In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by VirnoPaoloHardtMichael, 132–46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
LobatoRamon. 2012. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
25.
LotzAmanda D.2017. Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
26.
MarxGary T.2007. “What’s New About the ‘New Surveillance’? Classifying for Change and Continuity.” In The Surveillance Studies Reader, edited by HierSean P.GreenbergJosh, 83–94. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
27.
MayerVicki. 2011. Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
28.
MoscoVincent. 2015. “Working (or not) in the Cloud: Chains of Accumulation and Chains of Resistance.” In The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, edited by MaxwellRichard, 18–29. New York: Taylor and Francis.
SpigelLynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
35.
VoraKalinda. 2015. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
36.
WeeksKathi. 2007. “Life within and against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization7 (1): 233–49.
WolffSimone. 2015. “Behind The Line: Information Privatization and the Reification of Work in the Call Center of a Brazilian State-Owned Telecommunications Company.” In The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, edited by MaxwellRichard, 130–42. London: Taylor & Francis.
