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A few days ago, a group of teenagers taught me the term “dry texting.”

It’s anything that indicates “a change in the vibe of the conversation,” Tanisha, 18, told me. Someone who usually texts in all caps could revert to lowercase. They could text back only short replies, or comments that don’t invite a response — a “conversation ender,” as Joanne, 18, put it. Dry texting is the most common way kids at her school find out someone is mad at them, Akshaya, also 18, told me.

I was talking with the three teens — co-hosts of the podcast Behind the Screens — about something that came up on a recent episode that intrigued me. They argued that phones, texting, and social media could make it easier for teenagers to avoid conflict with each other, by providing them with numerous passive-aggressive methods of showing disapproval.

The teens’ comments stuck out to me because adults typically think of phones as igniting confrontation between young people, not the other way around. One Ohio school district, for example, banned phones in schools over concerns that students were using social media to orchestrate fights.

But as much as texting and social media can amplify disputes among teens, they can also transform these disputes into something quieter, more confusing, and sometimes harder to deal with. “Tech creates these subtle fault lines in communication,” Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, told me.

Behaviors like leaving someone on read, half-swiping on Snapchat, or turning off location sharing are “ambiguous signals,” Weinstein said. They could be innocent, or they could mean the sender is actually mad, an uncertainty that has teens “worrying, wondering, second- or even third-guessing what is meant.”

These ambiguities aren’t unique to teens — who among us has not sent or received the dreaded “ok” text? But today’s tweens and teens have also grown up........

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