pass a course or pass a test. They are not computer phobic, they don't need to stay away because of fear or panic. But they are computer reticent. They want to stay away, because the computer has come to symbolize an alien way of thinking. They learn to get by. And they learn to keep a certain distance. One of its symptoms is the language with which they neutralize the computer as they deny the possibility of using it creatively. Recall how Lisa dismissed it as " just a tool ." These responses begin to show how discrimination in the computer culture takes the form of discrimination against epistemological orientations, most strikingly, against the approach preferred by Lisa and Robin. STYLE AS SUBSTANCE Lisa and Robin share a preferred strategy for organizing work and a particular manner of identifying with computational objects. To capture the difference between them and their instructors, we describe a complex of attributes, an "approach" to knowledge, that encompasses several dimensions of difference. We isolate two approaches that serve its ideal types, theoretical prisms through which to see simplified projections of more complex realities. Lisa and Robin use a "soft" approach, and the instructors in their course are encouraging them to use a "hard" one. Our culture tends to equate soft with feminine and feminine with unscientific and undisciplined. Why use a term, soft , that may begin the discussion of difference with a devaluation? Because to refuse the word would be to accept the devaluation.