Events move quickly these days. Of course, they always did. But now that we can all live vicariously through the many social media portals channeling current events, the thrill of the Twitter feed makes events feel faster and more vital, somehow. Perhaps that's exactly why stories like what's unfolding in Russia right now should be marked with a caution sign.

Watching news pour in from the protests in Moscow last weekend for instance, including links to pictures like the AP shot shown at right, give the world a distinct impression that change is afoot. And it may be. Or, it may not be. Thursday's program will try take the pulse of how much change really might be on the ballot in Russia, and our interview with Joel Simon from the Committee to Protect Journalists makes plain that social media really has changed the game for all of us, especially journalists.

Here's the #Russia search on Twitter -- with news, analysis, and opinion accumulating faster than Siberian frost. And despite the odd ad for a bride, it truly does offer an unprecedented entry to a vast and mostly expert sampling of views on the situation in that country. If you want to go deep on this story, you can get to much of what you might want to know by starting here.

More hyperlocal -- and in some cases assuming you can read Russian -- myriad Facebook pages popped up to add protest after protest to the site. There is even a map to track the protests all around the world.

But for all its incredible vibrancy and user-directed greatness, social media is a lens, and as such it captures only part of the unfolding story. While it can magnify and expose a developing story, it may simultaneously obscure deeper, more significant elements of a complex reality. For instance, more than one of the experts I spoke to leading up to this program on Russia expressed dismay over the simplistic narrative -- and possibly false hope -- they felt was being fostered by the incredible portrait the protests paint, whether the protests right after the vote, on Dec. 5 and 6, or the much bigger ones held on Dec. 10 across Russia. Twitter, Facebook, and even the best slideshow can't hope to provide the kind of context that grounds a story like what's unfolding in Russia.

That's why my bet for the most over-reported aspect of news this year goes to the power of social media. As much as I love it all, and obsessively followed #Tahrir and #Libya and #cdnpoli for that matter, clicking through to actually read some of the analysis is where the true power of social media resides, in my view. In the wake of the Egyptian elections, for instance, it seems that perhaps the power of youth and social media perhaps wasn't as all pervasive in bringing down President Hosni Mubarak as it seemed in the moment. [NB: The Agenda earlier this week revisited Egypt and got at some of that complexity.] To be sure, the organizing and transparency that social media can facilitate make it a force to be reckoned with, but that was as obvious with the London riots as it was with any of the positive ways it helped people log into stories that appealed to them.

Don't get me wrong, I love this broadband, bird's-eye view of history unfolding, and I wouldn't put it right here in this post if I didn't think it's an unbelievable resource. I just also like to remind myself -- and I guess you -- that getting a fuller picture requires context, history, and perhaps a little more time to digest events sometimes. What do you think?

Follow Hilary Clark on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Dmitriy Chistoprudov/AP