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What is the purpose of writing published in small literary journals?

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This question returns to that posed by Teilo in one of his older posts. Off the top of my head, here are a few possible answers, which obviously overlap in places, followed by short meditations on each of them:

- Aesthetic enjoyment
- Narcissistic fulfillment
- Political/Cultural activism
- Community building/Networking

Aesthetic enjoyment:
Writing for the sake of writing. Producing combinations of words that are beautiful and then sharing those words with others in order to bask in this beauty together. This would include the intention of provoking thought, although perhaps these thoughts would be primarily of an abstract, aesthetic nature.

Narcissistic fulfillment
See Teilo's post from Oct.18th of last year (http://bit.ly/kzgnfq). He noticed that when people go to the website for The Oral Tradition they overwhelmingly spent their time on the submission guidelines page instead of checking out the past and current issues of the magazine. I've noticed this trend with The Writers Block as well. What's up with that? This trend would seem to indicate that most of us populating the online writing community are more concerned with getting ourselves published in as many places as possible than with actually reading other peoples' work. If this is the core reason for small (especially online) literary journals, perhaps that's why such venues often seem to struggle for aesthetic credibility in the arts community at large.

Political/Cultural activism
This is a tricky one, because as both a reader and an editor I usually detest work that has an obvious political message. But at the same time, politics and culture are inescapable and it seems naive to pretend otherwise, or to go about our writing with an attempted apolitical reserve. I can't help but agree with George Orwell when he asserts that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude...It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity." So all writing is political (and cultural), but to what extent does this motivate or inform the content of and submissions to small literary magazines?

Community building/Networking
Perhaps we write to link up and share ideas with other writers. But if we're not reading anyone but ourselves (which I realize is not necessarily or completely the case), that throws some suspicion on this motive. And with the anonymity of online exchanges, does this really happen?

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