On November 8, 2024, SoraNews24 published an article by Casey Baseel about a new product by Sega called the Emojam. (Link: Overwhelmed by modern social media? Japanese company is bringing back pagers with an emoji-twist) What is an Emojam? The report explains that the Emojam Japan-exclusive is a pager-inspired device for children.”Like pagers of yore, emojam doesn’t allow for text entry…” However, unlike pagers of yore, the Emojam only supports messages composed of emojis – 10 per message to be exact – from its selection of more than 1,100 pre-loaded emoji. The Emojam looks like a fun niche device of questionable utility and I encourage you to read Mr. Baseel’s report to learn more about it. The Emojam inspired me to write an article – but its focus will be a story from my time in high school instead of Sega’s kid-friendly emoji pager.

This story occurred when I was in 11th or 12th grade, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2006-2008. I am inclined to guess that this is a 2007 story, but I cannot narrow it down similarly to how I was able to pin-point when I received Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for the Nintendo GameCube in 2004 in an earlier article.

Several of my friends were big fans of the 2001-2010 TV series 24. I had never watched 24 and that remains the case in 2025. One aficionado of 24 was JC. JC and I talked often about professional football, in which we had an over-lapping interest. He was a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and I was a Carolina Panthers fan. While our favorite teams were different and only one (not mine) won a Super Bowl while we were in high school, our interests aligned in some cases such as telling New York Jets fans about Chad Pennington’s lack of arm strength (Mr. Pennington was a good quarterback, however), reminding New York Giants fans that they were quarterbacked by the lesser Manning (said lesser Manning went on to win a Super Bowl while we were in high school), and noting to one then-unfortunate San Francisco Giants fan that the team’s quarterback at the time, Alex Smith, had small hands (Mr. Smith went on to have a good career). But I digress. To the best of my recollection, TV outside of ESPN programming was not on our list of shared interests. But JC had a plan to change that.

I was talking to JC online using AIM – which was the popular instant messaging client in my school at the time (I did not use social media and while I had MSN Messanger, only a few people, JC not among them, also used it). JC was very amped up about 24. Perhaps he had just watched an episode or maybe another episode was on the horizon. I must have suggested in some way or another that I was not persuaded to watch 24. Apparently on the spot, JC came up with a way to illustrate for me the greatness of the show. I should have saved the chat transcript because I dare say it was, then and now, the greatest piece of instant messaging literature I had the pleasure of reading. Unfortunately, with nearly two decades between JC’s rendition of 24 and the drafting of the instant article, I can only recollect the story in broad strokes.

JC started writing out a 24 dialogue where in a series of messages where each message was a line of dialogue. (Context: JC did not ordinarily use emojis in our online conversations.) I recall that the main speaker was Jack Bauer – who I understood to be the counter-terrorism officer protagonist of the show. Jack was performing an interrogation. But what made JC’s work remarkable was not his writing, but instead his emojis – every line was accompanied by an emoji, and I think some of the lines were only single emojis. I distinctly remember breaking out laughing when Jack was depicted with an angry red emoji on one line. The dialogue went on for 20-30 lines before JC was finished.

JC’s dialogue persuaded me – not to watch 24, but instead of JC’s hidden talent. He never struck me as a future author, but he showed something – some special ability in this instance. I believe I told him that I had no need to watch 24 because he had distilled its essence in such an elegant way that the real thing could not possibly compare. JC had succeeded – just not in the way he intended.

I have never been much of an emoji wielder – perhaps unsurprising in light of the fact that I was one of the few people who used proper capitalization and punctuation on AIM in high school. But perhaps there was another reason. I saw the true power of emojis in one short conversation in high school about a TV show I never watched. Had the thought ever crossed my mind that I could use emojis well – JC’s short 24 dialogue disabused me of that notion. Whenever I see a story about emojis, I think back to the time I was first enraptured and second overawed by a generational emoji artist operating at the peak of his power.