Wirtualne wycieczki po małych miastach Mazowsza. Próba analizy retorycznej

Virtual tour’ or ‘virtual walk’ is present on many official websites of small towns. While often defined as a sequence of photos (most often spherical panoramas),virtual tour may be a name for various forms of presentation: videos, aerial photography or even plain text with few simple pictures. Other media are often used together with photos – most often music, voice or sound effects. This article explores both virtual tours which are unique, made especially for a given town and tours which are created by companies specialised in providing interactive presentations.Virtual tours are often presented on these websites as sources of reliable information, true and lifelike images of towns. This may suggest that the expected attitude towards virtual tour is naïve reception, ignoring differences between photography and reality. This however is not certain – naïve reception may be a mask taken by connoisseurs, experienced in various modes of audiovisual entertainment.I argue that classic rhetorical terms, such as inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria and actio may be useful for describing virtual tours in a wider perspective, not only as marketing tools for promoting tourism and supporting a town’s brand. In the sphere of inventio I stress such problems as creating borders and divisions and choosing places which are ‘worth’ of getting to the virtual word. Which places are omitted and which are eagerly put forward, displayed in the foreground? Dispositio is the art of arranging the content: virtual tours are mostly constructed as maps (where you can zoom to a chosen location) or albums (where you can go from one view to another). Elocutio concerns such matters as style, tropes and figures. Virtual tours often use various kinds of metaphors (especially pars pro toto) and exaggeration – the colors in photos are usually very bright, even striking. Virtual tours are not updated. They present a vision ‘frozen intime’ – which may be interesting as far as memoria is concerned. In the aspect of actio I pay attention to such questions as access, accessibility and possible interactions.Due to Flash technology virtual tours are often not accessible for disabled users.Contrary to many texts presenting virtual tours either as faithful mirrors that reflect real world or as strictly marketing devices, I argue that their main function is building an ideal version of a given town. Virtual tours help to express or to create group identities, visualize dreams, establish the core of accepted shared values.They may serve as utopias, masks covering urgent problems or toys for web users seeking new kinds of entertainment.