You know how literary studies since New Criticism mostly looks at text as closed units, with only some schools of thought, like Marxism, examining social context behind the creation of the text? That last part starts to cross the line into rhetoric. Rhetoric looks at texts (spoken, written, visual, whatever) as persuasive, world-creating instruments that crystallize communication into reality. We are interested in what they influence audiences to do, think, or feel differently, what mechanisms are used to accomplish that, how the audience receives and interacts with the texts, and why these texts were created in terms of both form and content.

If you think about the implications of that, the icon will seem more apropos.