Genre Characteristics of Virtual Guided Tours

The article aims to study the virtual tour as one of the genres of Internet communication. For this, types of virtual tours are identified and a description of oral virtual tours is given. Oral virtual tours in Russian, English and German are used as the material of the study. They include the synchronous virtual tours proposed on special platforms like https://www.heygo.com and the videos hosted on YouTube and Vkontakte. The analysis of oral virtual tours was carried out according to the Internet genre model with the focus on media, pragmatic, structural and linguistic parameters, as well as in terms of the communicative proximity / communicative distance model by Koch and Österreicher. As a result of the analysis, it was found that a virtual tour should be considered as a digital presentation and oral or written description of excursion objects, accompanied by a multimedia or textual movement from one object to another. In this sense, a virtual tour is a fairly broad concept, including different types – oral and written, synchronous and asynchronous. An oral virtual tour is distinguished by a high degree of interactivity and multimodality, existing in synchronous and asynchronous forms. An oral virtual tour combines signs of communicative proximity (irreversibility, multi-channel transmission of information, the ability to get an immediate response) and communicative distance (prepared speech, publicity, thematic relevance, predominantly monologue communication). It also shows some signs of the specific Internet environment (virtual situationality, overcoming physical disunity with the help of a video signal). The description of the virtual tour from the genre and linguistic point of view presented in the article allows to more competently build communication in the Internet environment and to broaden the theory of the genre.