It is worse than that: we have 100k years invested in language and 5k years invested in writing language down. Pure visual communication went out of style with the cavemen and was never very effective beyond being used as supplementary material.

Visual has some large advantages as well as drawbacks. It uses a different part of the brain for reading that works more in parallel, and can actually augment your short term memory. However, making visual work requires taking advantage of its concreteness, which textual language styles can't do very well.