What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept?
In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts.
Pictures and text are both programming languages of concepts.
But to formulate a counterpoint to this argument and support your original comment: The bytes we send via cables to transmit text are at a basic level just that: bytes. Ones and zeros. What makes these bytes understandable information is the fact that we have all agreed that a certain sequence of bits is assigned to a certain picture: A text symbol. This agreement has been a major source of pains and problems throughout the history of computing, think all these different text encodings and the problems that arise when you try to open a file with a different encoding than the one which it was saved with: You see a gibberish of symbols that do not make sense.
Which is why you have a point here: The pc does not care what information it transmits, it is only text because we have "taught" the pc to display a specific symbol (picture) when a certain sequence of bits is encountered.