I've gotta admit, this is a pet peeve of mine; I _prefer_ textual representation of concepts. I have never been able to keep track of what the bajillion different icons in use today are supposed to mean. They do provide a very concise graphical representation of a concept, but at some point, they all start to blur together. Does a microphone represent a switch to mute the microphone, an audio recording app, or perhaps an online news broadcast app? Does a book represent a PDF viewer, a Kindle-like app, or maybe some form of help documentation? Does a camera represent an app that lets you take pictures, or an app that lets you look at your library of stored images?

Ultimately, representing concepts pictographically will break down, because there are just too many concepts; it becomes too hard to learn and remember every icon. Humanity as a whole rejected pictographic and ideographic writing forms long ago; I'm really hoping that the infatuation with icons in modern GUIs eventually transforms to something more reasonable as well.