Oren Frank at AdAge gives us the pitch on why data visualization is “about” to become very important for businesses, missing the point that for many it’s been important for several years. Even with that odd point, he does hit the mark: It’s a matter of Bandwidth. Not the internet tho, your brain.
The problem is bandwidth; our text-based input/output through-rate just can’t cope with the amounts of information we deal with today. The results are all around us: shorter texts on all media, SMS, lower common denominators for content quality and, of course, the 140-character epidemic. Add to that the increase in the number of HD screens surrounding us and the exponential growth in processing power, bandwidth, and storage and you get the rise of data visualization as an important factor in modern communications.
