Athletes are prized for their peripheral vision, which gives them a broader view of possible plays and of teammates open on the sides. A point guard who appears to be looking straight ahead can flick a pass without interference to an unguarded shooter on the side for a three-point bucket. The periphery, it turns out, can be a good perch for unguarded attention.

The traditional approach for anyone tracking the news has been to check media mentions of an organization or an individual. There was once a corporate job devoted entirely to this: in the days of traditional media, a designated "clipper" scoured newspapers for items relating to the company and collected a daily offering of news items for internal circulation. Some of these clippings required an official reaction in the form of a "press release."

Online search engines have since taken over that function. They now track what items are of interest to a particular "clicker" and feed the individual reports and commentaries related to his searches, based on his current interests. The search engine made the traditional clipper's job redundant, although the clipping function continued for a while — extending even to online stories — until that too became unnecessary. The search-engine approach now supplies the individual with any related story or coverage he may be interested in. A commercial layer serves the same need for organizations: media-monitoring and social-listening services are paid to sweep online coverage for brand and company mentions.

The result can be misleading. It can seem as though one's favorite topic is all that social media is paying attention to — a biased view of what is actually going on in the news. The dynamic has a name: the "filter bubble," the term popularized by author Eli Pariser in 2011 for personalized results that quietly narrow what each user sees. This kind of "selective perception" can be exaggerated when the online search engine keeps feeding stories on a single topic. Is women's tennis all that people are now interested in? For the time being, this seems to be the case.

What is now called the "attention economy" requires even countries to achieve a high profile, preferably one featuring positive stories. The phrase traces to economist Herbert Simon, who observed in 1971 that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Can being the subject of social media help tourism? It remains a mystery how global attention is earned while ignoring the size of a country or its population spread in every country in the world. International media carry travel advertisements luring tourists with images of food, beaches, monuments, and smiling natives ready to display their world-renowned hospitality.

A lack of international media attention does not dampen the liveliness of local coverage. There is a local spotlight of newsworthiness all its own: power couples breaking up and then getting secretly married (did she sign the pre-nuptials?), impeachment hearings, personalities who glower or glow in these proceedings, and a languishing former leader detained in a foreign country with unattended skin problems. Celebrities continue to be covered even when they no longer make movies or occupy once-lofty positions of power. Celebrity status, past or present, opens the way to features in glossy magazines, chairing award-giving bodies, guesting on podcasts, cutting ribbons, and delivering commencement addresses at university graduation ceremonies.

Staying on the periphery of international media attention has its benefits. The country's credit rating, after the wave of corruption cases related to the budget for flood control, could put it on the international map for the wrong reason. Sovereign raters weigh governance and institutional strength alongside fiscal numbers when grading national creditworthiness, which is why corruption headlines can matter beyond the news pages. Thankfully, other crises with higher casualties can take over international media attention.

Local surveys — on public perception of scandals, approval ratings of the incumbents, or likely candidates running for the highest office in the next two years — no longer seem to have the air of inevitability they once possessed. Too many unknown pollsters are getting into the game, seemingly starting with the results they want and then supporting them with a non-random sample of respondents. The tell is disclosure: established pollsters publish their sample sizes, sampling methods, field dates, and margins of error, so readers can judge how much weight a finding can bear.

The attention span for news, whether favorable or negative, is thankfully short — estimated at around two weeks. After that, only a lingering memory of the scandal and the people involved remains, until those personalities pop up again when they decide to run in the next elections.

Social media can bring topics and personalities out of the periphery. But with the volume of opinions and stories being churned out, it is the search engines and algorithms that determine which news is forwarded to an already defined set of followers. Even the periphery varies with each individual — and with what news he wants to see.

Tony Samson is chairman and CEO of TOUCH xda. He can be reached at ar.samson@yahoo.com.