“Dry texting,” explained

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 enmeshed with devices in a way their elders didn’t. Their formative years have been marked by lockdowns and school closures, periods when, as podcast co-host Joanne put it, “the only type of interactions we could have had were behind a screen.” What happens when a machine for sending ambiguous signals becomes an integral part of your social life?

For answers, I turned to Scholastic’s Kid Reporters, a group of 10–14-year-olds who cover “news for kids, by kids.” The young journalists went to work in their respective schools, and came back with much the same observation the Behind the Screens co-hosts shared with me: phones definitely make it easier to ignore someone you don’t want to talk to.

“Sometimes it’s just easier to leave someone on read or not respond right away instead of talking face to face,” one 13-year-old told Scholastic reporter Aiden. “I’ve definitely avoided talking to someone in person and just showed I was mad by muting them for a bit. It’s kinda petty but it’s also how a lot of people deal with stuff now.”

“In real life you can’t ghost somebody,” Scholastic reporter Xander Dorsey told me in an email. “In texting you could say ‘oh, I’ll be right back.’ It’s much more awkward to walk off in real life.”

Teens can also express their displeasure with someone by taking them off their close friends list on Instagram, or — a more extreme step — unfollowing them entirely, Akshaya said. Online communication “makes it a lot easier to be passive-aggressive,” she explained.

But being on the receiving end of such passive aggression, whether it’s a “dry” text or message hanging there on the screen without a response, kids and experts agree: “It will trigger this anxious thinking spiral where they see that they’ve been left on read, and you start to wonder, are they mad at me?” Weinstein told me. “Do they hate me? Do they think I’m an idiot? Did I say the wrong thing?”

When the meaning does become clear, ambiguous signals can be even more painful than a more direct confrontation, teens say. “​​I got removed from a group chat and found out they were talking about me behind my back,” the same 13-year-old told Aiden. “I felt confused and like I wasn’t even worth a real explanation.”

“It hurt even more that they didn’t just come talk to me,” she added.

Passive-aggressive phone behavior is far from unique to kids. But because they’re at a developmental stage in which they’re extremely sensitive to what their peers are thinking and feeling about them, “they’re more likely to be scrutinizing these ambiguous signals,” Weinstein said.

Adolescence is also a time when conflict resolution skills are still developing, Weinstein said. We all need those skills because “life is full of conflict,” said Darja Djordjevic, a psychiatrist who works with Stanford Brainstorm, a lab focused on mental health and digital well-being. Dealing with people who disagree with us is a crucial part of growing up.

Some fear that phones could disrupt that process. “We learn how to argue and fight productively in person,” Djordjevic said. Sending ambiguous signals over text or social media could represent “a lost opportunity for confronting things” in real life.

There’s a lot of concern among adults about how phones affect social skills more generally, and while I don’t always share that concern, I think it’s reasonable to ask whether new forms of communication will change how teens handle (or don’t handle) confrontation as they mature.

The older teens I spoke with allayed these concerns somewhat. Akshaya told me that when she and her friends were younger, “we would start removing each other from our followings if there was a big falling-out, or getting dry and stuff to avoid talking to each other.” Now that they’re about to graduate from high school, though, “I don’t see it as much.”

Kids also pointed out that phones can sometimes actually help them resolve a conflict. Texting “gives me time to think before responding and helps me express my thoughts more clearly,” one 12-year-old told Aiden. “Sometimes it’s less intimidating to start a difficult conversation through messages, and that can help us work out the problem later.”

Teens will also often show a draft text to multiple friends before hitting send, Tanisha told me. That way, “you’re more confident that that text isn’t going to be something bad or anything like that, because you have other people’s approval.” (With workshopping texts, however, there is a risk that “your voice kind of gets lost,” she noted.)

And avoiding confrontation isn’t always the worst thing. If, for example, a kid lives in a community or goes to a school where physical fights are common, “the stakes of certain kinds of online conflict are very different than a teen who’s in a context where all that might happen is someone’s gonna be mad at them,” Weinstein said. For some teens, ambiguous signals could actually be a way to stay safe.

Still, just as teenagers might need tools for responding to big, loud problems like bullying, they need help dealing with the subtle fault lines their phones create as well. It starts with listening to young people about the role tech plays in their lives, Weinstein said.

Some app features that may seem benign to adults (Instagram close friends or location sharing come to mind) can feel very different for teens, Weinstein explained. “So often, adults miss or misunderstand aspects of what teens are experiencing behind their screens.”

The kids I talked to also had advice for their peers dealing with dry texting and other ambiguous phone behaviors, much of it strikingly low-tech. Scholastic reporter Evy, 12, recommends hashing things out in person whenever possible. “Having a real conversation with them and laughing with them — that makes it so much better,” she said.

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A reader recently reached out to tell me she received an email from Google notifying her that the company’s Gemini AI apps would soon be available for kids, allowing them to “create stories, songs, and poetry,” and “get homework help.” The reader found the Google email “off-putting and disturbing,” she said, “as if they are saying it’s inevitable that kids will be relying heavily on AI in the future, so here’s a guide on how to get them started young.”

Next week, I’ll be talking with Vox senior tech correspondent — and User Friendly newsletter author — Adam Clark Estes about the role of AI in kids’ lives. If you, like the reader above, have thoughts about how the kids you know use (or don’t use) AI — or questions for me and Adam as we chat — let me know at [email protected].