It is easy and common to underestimate the cost of information. This one is proportional to the effort needed to receive, but also to validate, to take position, i.e. to engage one's own responsibility towards a given piece of information. This is highly dependent on the representation of the information.
Now of course (i.e. barring Plato), no information exists without a representation, even if no representation stands a priori out.
Out of many possible representations, adequate ones will be these for which the effort is distributed proportionally to the quantity of information, these which offer a continuous locality of information. In practice, this requirement often excludes visual representations.
An interesting concept related to the cost of information is this of cognitive load.