Hans Rosling demonstrated it to the general public in his TED talks in a beautiful way, but mankind has been busy with the visualization of data for hundreds of years to make them graspable.
The context in which a fact is presented can turn around the perception of something by 180°. Be it scale, scaling or even the colors: red/green has a positive/negative connotation in the western hemisphere, but for the same purpose red/blue is used in Japan.
Along with that there's great responsibility to use the given data in an optimal way for the task at hand, without distorting it, thus deceiving the people. Some fields of work are sadly infamous for using deception.
We visualize data to monitor critical backend infrastructure—the ELK stack has been with us on this journey for a long time. To make data graspable for the enduser we increasingly use D3.js.