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You've got 741 Facebook friends, a cellphone rammed with numbers and an e-mail inbox that keeps on filling up. You might consider those things indicative of your popularity, but a well-accepted social theory suggests there is a limit to the number of people any given individual can maintain relationships with.

"Dunbar's number," named after Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, suggests that the maximum number of family, friends, co-workers and acquaintances people can have in their social circle while still being able to recall how everyone is connected to them and the group at large is about 150.

Now, with the advent of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking technology, instead of losing touch with old friends and acquaintances, we are able to defy some of the social norms that once restricted our social groups by re-establishing and maintaining contact with hundreds of online "friends." Such technological advances are often dismissed as a shallow means to trade gossip or engage in narcissistic tendencies with reckless abandon.

But an emerging group of social experts sees it much differently.

"This is the democratization of a privilege that has always existed for really wealthy elites," said Grant McCracken, a well-known Canadian cultural anthropologist at the Convergence Culture Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written extensively on consumer behaviour. "As a result of certain social tier, they're all in a network, even if they don't know each other."

His new book, Chief Culture Officer, will be published this fall. In it, Mr. McCracken argues that corporations need to have cultural experts just like they need chief executive officers, since "culture is now the source of some of its greatest opportunities and biggest dangers."

Social networking sites that allow us to send simultaneous updates to hundreds of people and have access to a wide pool of "friends" who can tell us about opportunities or events we would otherwise be ignorant of marks a revolution in communication, Mr. McCracken said.

"It should make the world a less accidental place," Mr. McCracken said. "It will be easier for us to find the people we really like, which ought to mean our friendships are more meaningful, are more grounding, more rewarding. ... [It] ought to mean we find the jobs we find most rewarding."

Other experts feel that instead of enhancing our lives, social networks may actually be degrading our relationships and turning our communications into cheap, superficial substitutes for face-to-face conversations.

"It becomes a very, very sort of shallow form of communication," said Avner Levin, director of the Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute at Ryerson University's Ted Rogers School of Management. "Although you're obsessed with it, you're not doing anything meaningful with it."

According to Mr. Levin, our brains are not equipped to handle ongoing communication with networks of up to 400 or 500 individuals. That means social networking may involve a trade-off between quantity of friends versus quality of interactions.

But Mr. McCracken likened online status updates to "pinging" the social hive around us, providing quick bursts of information for our online friends. To him, an oversized social network doesn't preclude engaging, meaningful interactions. Rather, it allows us to give and take pieces of information from those around us, choosing to intensively engage with those we choose.

"We're saying that people can sustain larger groups with the same or perhaps even a smaller investment," Mr. McCracken said.

So while Dunbar's number may remain at 150, putting a cap on our online social lives may be impossible.