In search of the lost movement in communication research 65 Figure 4 What is an attractor? It is the system’s routine, the behavior that this particular system always ends up having, be- yond the fact that it presents variations along the way. It is as if the system we are talking about was attracted to having that routine, hence the name Edward Lorenz gave it in 1963 when he was studying changing systems and needed to calculate the algorithm to predict the weather. In dynamic systems, an attractor is a set of numerical values towards which a system tends to evolve, given a wide variety of initial conditions. There are different types of classic attractors, such as the one of a fixed point (for example, a pendu- lum) or that of a limit cycle (e.g., radio waves). The names relate precisely to the type of movement these configurations cause in the systems. The one in which we communicators are particu- larly interested is a chaotic or strange attractor. An attractor is strange when it is fractal; that is: when its structure is replicated at different scales of dynamic systems. Fractal mathematics maintains that, in all living things, there are
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