To browse Academia. In this paper we evaluate the role that online dating plays in establishing successful and sustainable romantic relationships. We reject radically optimistic accounts online dating enables creation of particularly successful relationships and radically pessimistic accounts online dating is destructive for relationships. In our argumentation in favor of a moderated liberal position we rely upon the conceptual framework of American pragmatism James and Rorty and in particular upon their analyses of " experience ".
Rorty's account enables us to speak of interpersonal experience that does not involve physical contact and relies uniquely on the language. In such cases the language stops being a medium and becomes the experience itself. This is our main tool to speak of experience in the context of interpersonal relations fully mediated by internet.
Building upon American pragmatism, we use the concept of an " extra-layer " of experience that covers internet-mediated interpersonal relations. We claim that the extra-layer fully integrates with other layers of human experience, and enables us to speak of " mixed reality ".
We conclude that internet-mediated interactions-ubiquitous nowadays for a non negligible part of the society-shall be treated as an inevitable extensions of physical face-to-face experience. As such they become a natural part of our lives and as such cannot be proclaimed simply good or simply bad.
In consequence, there is no one possible way in which online dating can be evaluated uniformly as a separate phenomenon. Keywords: online dating media theory social media mixed reality experience American pragmatism.
