Reason #1: People Don’t Know What Data Visualization Is
Reason #2: Crappy Existing Visualizations have Polluted Perception
Reason #3: People are Unable to Mentally Separate the View from the Data
Reason #4: Visualization is Difficult to Create and Easy to Copy
Reason #5: People Won’t Pay for Visualization?
It’s tragic really. The internet enables completely new ways to visualize data to learn more about connections that could not have been seen prior to this technology. It’s still a relatively new science but there are some big names out there pushing the technology. This was on the NY Times front page for a while today, but now is unfortunately nowhere to be found. My hat goes off to the Times for embracing these technologies so frequently.