But odds are these icons have been there (unchanged) since before the invention of unicode, so that's hardly an example of the "iconitis" you mention, right?
Iconitis escaped from the laboratory in 1983, when Apple decided that English was obsolete and we should revert to the language of the Pharaohs. (Well, except that even the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt discovered that phonetics was better, and turned their hieroglyphs into a phonetic alphabet. The Mayans did, too.)
An Apple evangelist came to my workplace in 1983 and gleefully tried to sell the engineers on the idea that a drawing of a Kleenex box was better than the word "print". The trouble is "print" is a verb, and nobody has yet come up with an icon for it in 40 years of trying.
These icons are far older than unicode, and in fact is not in unicode at the moment. There's a proposal to add them, but I don't believe it's passed yet. The standardized icons themselves date from the 1970s, though non-standard laundry symbols are much older than that.
Design use of icons over text has nothing to do with Unicode, it's a natural part of human expression. Icons are everywhere, from traffic signs to laundry symbols to buttons on computers to ramblings signs. I think your reading of the typographical history here is simply wrong, neither Apple nor Unicode is responsible for the "iconiziation" of communication. We've always used icons for communication, and we always will.
If your issue is with Emoji, then you should make that case instead. Personally, i think it's great that if I send an emoji from an iPhone to an Android phone (or from/to essentially any device), you get a consistent symbol, instead of being locked in to whatever your manufacturer was using (the fact that this kind of lock-in was occurring was the original motivation for adding emoji to Unicode).
Btw, laundry symbols are a perfect demonstration for another wonderful feature of using icons: they're cross language. You can put one tag on a piece of clothing and sell it anywhere in the world. Not everyone speaks English.
And yet we get bagels both with and without cream cheese. Says something about Unicode's priorities doesn't it?
This argument sounds attractive and inclusive, but it doesn't make any practical sense.
If a cheat sheet is needed to determine what icons mean, one column for the icon and the other with the meaning in the user's native language, what is the essential difference between that and replacing the icons with English words?
Why is it easier to learn what a strange symbol means than the word "print" ? At least if someone is faced with "print" they can figure out what it means by typing it into google or a dictionary. Not so with an unfamiliar icon.
edit. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201001165119/https://www.ginet...