Apparently
socialism is the most looked up word of 2015.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Not a bad thing if people are learning about politics. Looking up the word doesn't mean they agree
It will be just curiosity, when Ron Paul came along I found myself looking up Libertarianism and eventually Anarchism many student now aren't taught a thing about what I'd call real politics, they're only taught it in the context of what's mainstream, so they'll likely have never heard of Socialism before.
Socialism involves the sharing of economic resources fairly between the population, whereas communism includes this, but also involves breaking down the class system itself. With communism, the workers actually own everything, and are paid based on their need rather than the work they've done. But with socialism, they are instead paid based on the work they've done, and the state owns everything.
Am I thinking along the right lines? I find it a little complicated if I'm honest...
That's correct to an extent, Socialism and Communism in general revolves around controlling the means of production, in short they both want to control the factories, the infastructure, we all use or rely on, on a daily basis. The differences between Socialism and Communism are what methods they use to achieve that. I don't know about Socialism being about being controlled by the state, I'm not sure about that, but Communism definitely is about the state, this is why you see so many self-declared Communist states devolve into a dictatorship because that's pretty much what they're advocating but they make it sound nice by claiming wealth will be redistributed and everyone will be better off.
What's very interesting though is a lot of self-proclaimed Socialists and Communists you'll find at universities and so on have absolutely no fucking clue about this, they're just all about taxing the rich and think that by all of a sudden taking over the government everything's going to fix itself, they have no real knowledge of what their own ideology is about. I happen to know this because I went onto a supposedly left wing Anarchist subreddit and they pretty much displayed that, the left seems to be entirely co-opted by feminists now that only care about gender or identity politics and attacking people over trivial bullshit.