Which would you rather call out over the phone, a long string of binary numbers or a short string of hexadecimal numbers?

You need a hex editor as mentioned, like
http://www.softcircuits.com/cygnus/fe/
You just convert the hexadecimal bytes to binary in your head.

You don't see them because "1" and "0" are just the symbols we have given to binary numbers. We could have called them "alphas" and "betas" or anything else instead. Asking what a 1 or 0 is ...