From Michael Benedikt's essay
"Cyberspace: Some Proposals"

Cyberspace is a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or "virtual" reality. In this reality, to which every computer is a window, seen or heard objects are neither physical nor, necessarily, representations of physical objects but are, rather, in form, character, and action, made up of data, of pure information. This information derives in part from the operations of the natural, physical world, but for the most part, it derives from the immense traffic of information that constitute human enterprise in science, art, business, and culture.

The dimensions, axes, and coordinates of cyberspace are thus not necessarily the familiar ones of our natural, gravitational environment: though mirroring our expectations of natural spaces and places, they have dimensions impressed with informational value appropriate for optimal orientation and navigation in the data accessed.

In cyberspace, information-intensive institutions and businesses have a form, identity, and working reality--in a word and quite literally, an architecture--that is counterpart and different to the form, identity, and working reality they have in the physical world. The ordinary physical reality of these institutions, businesses, etc., are seen as surface phenomena, as husks, their true energy coursing in architectures unseen except in cyberspace.